IT WAS A BIZARRE creature, ghostlike, vaguely menacing and never still, but no one who stood before it could look away. Mae was hypnotized by it, its slashing form, its fins like blades, its milky skin and wool-grey eyes. It was certainly a shark, it had its distinctive shape, its malevolent stare, but this was a new species, omnivorous and blind. Stenton had brought it back from his trip to the Marianas Trench, in the Circle submersible. The shark was not the only discovery—Stenton had retrieved heretofore unknown jellyfishes, seahorses, manta rays, all of them near-translucent, ethereal in their movements, all on display in a series of enormous aquariums he’d had constructed, nearly overnight, to house them.
Mae’s tasks were to show her watchers the beasts, to explain when necessary, and to be, through the lens worn around her neck, a window into this new world, and the world, generally, of the Circle. Every morning Mae put on a necklace, much like Stewart’s, but lighter, smaller, and with the lens worn over her heart. There, it presented the steadiest view, and the widest. It saw everything that Mae saw, and often more. The quality of the raw video was such that viewers could zoom, pan, freeze and enhance. The audio was carefully engineered to focus on her immediate conversations, to record but make secondary any ambient sound or background voices. In essence, it meant that any room she was in was scannable by anyone watching; they could focus in on any corner, and, with some effort, isolate and listen to any other conversation.
There was to be a feeding for all of Stenton’s discoveries any minute, but the animal she and her watchers were particularly interested in was the shark. She hadn’t yet seen it eat, but word was it was insatiable and very quick. Though blind, it found its meals immediately, no matter how big or small, alive or dead, and digested them with alarming speed. One minute a herring or squid would be dropped into the tank with it, and moments later the shark would deposit, on the aquarium floor, all that remained of that animal—a tiny grainy substance that looked like ash. This act was made more fascinating given the shark’s translucent skin, which allowed an unfettered view into its digestive process.
She heard a droplet through her earpiece. “Feeding moved back to 1:02,” a voice said. It was now 12:51.
Mae looked down the dark hallway, to the three other aquariums, each of them slightly smaller than the one before it. The hall was kept entirely unlit, to best highlight the electric-blue aquariums and the fog-white creatures within.
“Let’s move over to the octopus for now,” the voice said.
The main audio feed, from Additional Guidance to Mae, was provided via a tiny earpiece, and this allowed the AG team to give her occasional directions—to suggest she drop by the Machine Age, for example, to show her watchers a new, solar-powered consumer drone that could travel unlimited distances, across continents and seas, provided adequate exposure to sun; she’d done that visit earlier this day. This was a good portion of her day, the touring of various departments, the introduction of new products, either Circle-made or Circle-endorsed. It ensured that every day was different, and had, in the six weeks she’d been transparent, exposed Mae to virtually every corner of the campus—from the Age of Sail to the Old Kingdom, where they were, on a lark more than anything, working on a project to attach a camera to every remaining polar bear.
“Let’s see the octopus,” Mae said to her viewers.
She moved over to a round glass structure sixteen feet high and twelve feet in diameter. Inside, a pale spineless being, the hue of a cloud but veined in blue and green, was feeling around, guessing and flailing, like a near-blind man fumbling for his glasses.
“This is a relative of the telescope octopus,” Mae said, “but this one has never been captured alive before.”
Its shape seemed to change continuously, balloon-like and bulbous one moment, as if inflating itself, confident and growing, then the next it would be shrinking, spinning, stretching and reaching, unsure of its true form.
“As you can see, its true size is very hard to discern. One second it seems like you could hold it in your hand, and the next it encompasses most of the tank.”
The creature’s tentacles seemed to want to know everything: the shape of the glass, the topography of the coral below, the feel of the water all around.
“He’s almost endearing,” Mae said, watching the octopus reach from wall to wall, spreading itself like a net. Something about its curiosity gave it a sentient presence, full of doubt and wanting.
“Stenton found this one first,” she said about the octopus, which was now rising from the floor, slowly, flamboyantly. “It came from behind his submersible and shot in front, as if it were asking him to follow. You can see how fast it might have moved.” The octopus was now careening around the aquarium, propelling itself in motions like the opening and closing of an umbrella.
Mae checked the time. It was 12:54. She had a few minutes to kill. She kept her lens on the octopus.
She was under no illusion that every minute of every day was equally scintillating to her watchers. In the weeks Mae had been transparent, there had been downtime, a good deal of it, but her task, primarily, was to provide an open window into life at the Circle, the sublime and the banal. “Here we are in the gym,” she might say, showing viewers the health club for the first time. “People are running and sweating and devising ways to check each other out without getting caught.” Then, an hour later, she might be eating lunch, casually and without commentary, across from other Circlers, all of them behaving, or attempting to, as if no one was watching at all. Most of her fellow Circlers were happy to be on-camera, and after a few days all Circlers knew that it was a part of their job at the Circle, and an elemental part of the Circle, period. If they were to be a company espousing transparency, and the global and unending advantages of open access, they needed to be living that ideal, always and everywhere, and especially on campus.
Thankfully, there was enough to illuminate and celebrate within the Circle gates. The fall and winter had brought the inevitable, all of it, with blitzkrieg speed. All over campus there were signs that hinted at imminent Completion. The messages were cryptic, meant to pique curiosity and discussion. What would Completion mean? Staffers were asked to contemplate this, submit answers, and write on the idea boards. Everyone on Earth has a Circle account! one popular message said. The Circle solves world hunger, said another. The Circle helps me find my ancestors, said yet another. No data, human or numerical or emotional or historical, is ever lost again. That one had been written and signed by Bailey himself. The most popular was The Circle helps me find myself.
So many of these developments had been long in the planning stages at the Circle, but the timing had never been quite so right, and the momentum was too strong to be resisted. Now, with 90 percent of Washington transparent, and the remaining 10 percent wilting under the suspicion of their colleagues and constituents, the question beat down on them like an angry sun: what are you hiding? The plan was that most Circlers would be transparent within the year, but for the time being, to work out the bugs and get everyone used to the idea, it was just Mae and Stewart, but his experiment had been largely eclipsed by Mae’s. Mae was young, and moved far quicker than Stewart, and had her voice—watchers loved it, comparing it to music, calling it like woodwind and a wonderful acoustic strum—and Mae was loving it, too, feeling daily the affection of millions flow through her.
It took getting used to, though, starting with the basic working of the equipment. The camera was light, and after a few days, Mae could barely sense the weight of the lens, no heavier than a locket, over her breastbone. They’d tried various ways to keep it on her chest, including velcro attached to her clothing, but nothing was as effective, and simple, as simply hanging it around her neck. The second adjustment, one she found continually fascinating and occasionally jarring, was seeing—through a small frame on her right wrist—what the camera was seeing. She’d all but forgotten about her left-wrist health monitor, but the camera had made essential the use of this, a second, right-wrist bracelet. It was the same size and material as her left, but with a larger screen to accommodate video and a summation of all of her data on her usual screens. With a bracelet on each wrist, each snug and with a brushed-metal finish, she felt like Wonder Woman and knew something of her power—though the idea was too ridiculous to tell anyone about.
On her left wrist, she saw her heartbeat; on her right, she could see what her watchers were seeing—a real-time view from her lens, which allowed her to make any necessary adjustments to the view. It also gave her current watcher numbers, her rankings and ratings, and highlighted the most recent and most popular comments from viewers. At that moment, standing before the octopus, Mae had 441,762 watchers, which was a little above her average, but still less than what she’d hoped for while revealing Stenton’s deep-sea discoveries. The other numbers displayed were unsurprising. She was averaging 845,029 unique visitors to her live footage in any given day, and had 2.1 million followers to her Zing feed. She no longer had to worry about staying in the T2K; her visibility, and the immense power of her audience, guaranteed stratospheric Conversion Rates and Retail Raws, and ensured she was always in the top ten.
“Let’s see the seahorses,” Mae said, and moved to the next aquarium. There, amid a pastel bouquet of coral and flowing fronds of blue seaweed, she saw hundreds, maybe thousands, of tiny beings, no bigger than the fingers of a child, hiding in nooks, clinging to the foliage. “Not particularly friendly fish, these guys. Wait, are they even fish?” she asked, and looked to her wrist, where a watcher had already sent the answer. Absolutely a fish! Class Actinopterygii. Same as cod and tuna.
“Thank you, Susanna Win from Greensboro!” Mae said, and rezinged the information to her followers. “Now let’s see if we can find the daddy of all these baby seahorses. As you might know, the male seahorse is the one that carries the offspring. The hundreds of babies you see were birthed just after the daddy arrived here. Now where is he?” Mae walked around the aquarium, and soon found him, about the size of her hand, resting at the bottom of the tank, leaning against the glass. “I think he’s hiding,” Mae said, “but he doesn’t seem to know we’re on the other side of the glass here, and can see everything.”
She checked her wrist and adjusted the angle of her lens a bit, to get the best look at the fragile fish. He was curled with his back to her, looking exhausted and shy. She put her face, and lens, up to the glass, so close to him she could see the tiny clouds in his intelligent eyes, the unlikely freckles on his delicate snout. He was an improbable creature, a terrible swimmer, built like a Chinese lantern and utterly without defense. Her wrist highlighted a zing with exceptionally high ratings. The croissant of the animal kingdom, it said, and Mae repeated it aloud. But despite his fragility, somehow he had already reproduced, had given life to a hundred more like himself, while the octopus and the shark had traced the contours of their tanks and eaten. Not that the seahorse seemed to care. He was apart from his progeny, as if having no clue where they came from, and no interest in what happened to them.
Mae checked the time. 1:02. Additional Guidance spoke through her earpiece: “Shark feeding ready.”
“Okay,” Mae said, glancing at her wrist. “I’m seeing a bunch of requests that we get back to the shark, and it’s after one, so I’m thinking we’ll do that.” She left the seahorse, who turned to her, briefly, as if not wanting to see her go.
Mae made her way back to the first and largest aquarium, which held Stenton’s shark. Above the aquarium, she saw a young woman, with curly black hair and cuffed white jeans, standing atop a sleek red ladder.
“Hello,” Mae said to her. “I’m Mae.”
The woman seemed ready to say “I know that,” but then, as if remembering they were on camera, adopted a studied, performative tone. “Hello Mae, I’m Georgia, and I’ll be feeding Mr. Stenton’s shark now.”
And then, though it was blind, and there was no food yet in the tank, the shark seemed to sense a feast was at hand. It began turning like a cyclone, rising ever-closer to the surface. Mae’s watchers had already risen by 42,000.
“Someone’s hungry,” Mae said.
The shark, which had seemed only passingly menacing before, now appeared vicious and wholly sentient, the embodiment of the predatory instinct. Georgia was attempting to look confident, competent, but Mae saw fear and trepidation in her eyes. “Ready down there?” she asked, without taking her eyes off the shark making its way toward her.
“We’re ready,” Mae said.
“Okay, I’m going to feed the shark something new today. As you know, he’s been fed all kinds of stuff, from salmon to herring to jellyfish. He’s devoured everything with equal enthusiasm. Yesterday we tried a manta, which we didn’t expect him to enjoy, but he didn’t hesitate, and ate with gusto. So today we’re again experimenting with a new food. As you can see,” she said, and Mae noticed that the bucket she carried was made of lucite, and inside she saw something blue and brown, with too many legs. She heard it ticking against the bucket walls: a lobster. Mae had never thought of sharks eating lobsters, but she couldn’t see why they wouldn’t.
“Here we have a regular Maine lobster, which we’re not sure if this shark is equipped to eat.”
Georgia was perhaps trying to put on a good show, but even Mae was nervous about how long she was holding the lobster over the water. Drop it, Mae thought to herself. Please drop it.
But Georgia was holding it over the water, presumably for the benefit of Mae and her viewers. The shark, meanwhile, had sensed the lobster, had no doubt mapped its shape with whatever sensors it possessed, and was circling quicker, still obedient but at the end of its patience.
“Some sharks can process the shells of crustaceans like this, some can’t,” Georgia said, now dangling the lobster such that its claw was lazily touching the surface. Drop it, please, Mae thought. Please drop it now.
“So I’ll just drop this little guy into—”
But before she could finish her sentence the shark had risen up and snatched the lobster from the caretaker’s hand. By the time Georgia let out a squeal and grabbed her fingers, as if to count them, the shark was already back in the middle of the tank, the lobster engulfed in its jaws, the crustacean’s white flesh spraying from the shark’s wide mouth.
“Did he get you?” Mae asked.
Georgia shook her head, holding back tears. “Almost.” She rubbed her hand as if it had been burned.
The lobster had been consumed, and Mae saw something gruesome and wonderful: the lobster was being processed, inside the shark, in front of her, with lightning speed and incredible clarity. Mae saw the lobster broken into dozens, then hundreds of pieces, in the shark’s mouth, then saw those pieces make their way through the shark’s gullet, its stomach, its intestines. In minutes the lobster had been reduced to a grainy, particulate substance. The waste left the shark and fell like snow to the aquarium floor.
“Looks like he’s still hungry,” Georgia said. She was atop the ladder again, but now with a different lucite container. While Mae had been watching the digestion of the lobster, Georgia had retrieved a second meal.
“Is that what I think it is?” Mae asked.
“This is a Pacific sea turtle,” Georgia said, holding up the container that held the reptile. It was about as big as Georgia’s torso, painted in a patchwork of green and blue and brown, a beautiful animal unable to move in the tight space. Georgia opened the door at one end of the container, as if inviting the turtle to exit if he so chose. He chose to stay where he was.
“There’s little chance our shark has encountered one of these, given the difference in their habitats,” Georgia said. “This turtle would have no reason to spend time where Stenton’s shark dwells, and the shark surely has never seen the light-dappled areas where the turtles live.”
Mae wanted to ask if Georgia were truly about to feed that turtle to the shark. Its eyes had beheld the predator below, and was now, with the slow energy it could harness, pushing its way to the back of the container. Feeding this kindly creature to the shark, no matter the necessity or scientific benefit, would not please many of Mae’s watchers. Already zings were coming through her wrist. Please don’t kill that turtle. It looks like my granddad! There was a second thread, though, that insisted the shark, which was not much bigger than the turtle, would not be able to swallow or digest the reptile, with its impenetrable shell. But just when Mae was about to question the imminent feeding, an AG voice came through Mae’s earpiece. “Hold tight. Stenton wants to see this happen.”
In the tank, the shark was circling again, looking every bit as lean and ravenous as before. The lobster had been nothing to it, a meaningless snack. Now it rose closer to Georgia, knowing the main course was approaching.
“Here we go,” Georgia said, and tilted the container until the turtle began sliding, slowly, toward the neon water, which was swirling beneath him—the shark’s turning had created a vortex. When the container was vertical, and the turtle’s head had cleared the lucite threshold, the shark could wait no longer. It rose up, grabbed the turtle’s head in its jaws, and pulled it under. And like the lobster, the turtle was consumed in seconds, but this time it took a shape-shifting that the crustacean hadn’t required. The shark seemed to unhook its jaw, doubling the size of its mouth, enabling it to easily subsume the whole of the turtle in one swallow. Georgia was narrating, saying something about how many sharks, when eating turtles, will turn their stomachs inside out, vomiting the shells after digesting the fleshy parts of the reptile. But Stenton’s shark had other methods. The shell seemed to dissolve inside the shark’s mouth and stomach like a cracker soaked in saliva. And in less than a minute, the turtle, all of it, had been turned to ash. It exited the shark as had the lobster, in flakes that fell ponderously to the aquarium floor, joining, and indistinguishable from, those that had come before.
Mae was watching this when she saw a figure, nearly a silhouette, on the other side of the glass, beyond the aquarium’s far wall. His body was just a shadow, his face invisible, but then, for a moment, the light from above reflected on the circling shark’s skin, and revealed the figure’s face.
It was Kalden.
Mae hadn’t seen him in a month, and since her transparency, hadn’t heard any word from him. Annie had been in Amsterdam, then China, then Japan, then back to Geneva, and so hadn’t had time to focus on Kalden, but the two of them had traded occasional messages about him. How concerned should they be about this unknown man?
But then he’d disappeared.
Now he was standing, looking at her, unmoving.
She wanted to call out, but then worried. Who was he? Would calling to him, capturing him on camera, create some scene? Would he flee? She was still in shock from the shark’s digestion of the turtle, from its dull-eyed wrath, and she found she had no voice, no strength to say Kalden’s name. So she stared at him, and he stared at her, and she had the thought that if she could catch him on her camera, perhaps she could show this to Annie, and that might lead to some clarity, some identification. But when Mae looked to her wrist, she saw only the darkest form, his face obscured. Perhaps her lens couldn’t see him, was watching from a different angle. As she tracked his shape on her wrist, he backed away and walked off into the shadows.
Meanwhile, Georgia had been nattering about the shark and what they’d witnessed, and Mae hadn’t caught any of it. But now she was standing atop her ladder, waving, hoping that Mae was finished, because she had nothing left to feed the animal. The show was over.
“Okay then,” Mae said, thankful for the chance to get away and to follow Kalden. She said goodbye and thanks to Georgia, and walked briskly through the dark hallway.
She caught sight of his silhouette leaving through a faraway door, and she picked up her pace, careful not to shake her lens or call out. The door he’d slipped through led to the newsroom, which would be a logical enough place for Mae to be visiting next. “Let’s see what’s going on in the newsroom,” she said, knowing all within would be aware of her approach in the twenty steps it would take her to get there. She also knew that the SeeChange cameras in the hallway, over the doorway, would have caught Kalden, and she’d know sooner or later if it was actually him. Every movement within the Circle was caught on one camera or another, usually three, and reconstructing anyone’s movements, after the fact, was only a few minutes’ work.
As she approached the newsroom door, Mae thought of Kalden’s hands upon her. His hands reaching low, pulling himself into her. She heard the low rumble of his voice. His taste, like some wet fresh fruit. What if she found him? She couldn’t take him to the bathroom. Or could she? She would find a way.
She opened the door to the newsroom, a wide space Bailey had modeled on old-time newspaper offices, with a hundred low cubicles, news tickers and clocks everywhere, each desk with a retro analog telephone, a row of white buttons below the numbers, blinking arrhythmically. There were old printers, fax machines, telex devices, letterpresses. The decor, of course, was for show. All the retro machines were nonfunctional. The news gatherers, whose faces were now upon Mae, smiling, saying hello to her and her watchers, were able to do most of their reporting via SeeChange. There were now over a hundred million cameras functional and accessible around the world, making in-person reporting unnecessarily expensive and dangerous, to say nothing of the carbon expenditures.
As Mae walked through the newsroom, the staff waved to her, unsure if this was an official visit. Mae waved back, scanning the room, knowing she appeared distracted. Where was Kalden? There was only one other exit, so Mae rushed through the room, nodding and greeting, until she came to the door on the far end. She opened it, flinching at the bright light of day, and saw him. He was crossing the wide green lawn, passing the new sculpture by that Chinese dissident—she remembered she should highlight it soon, maybe even today—and just then he turned briefly, as if checking to see if Mae was still following. Her eyes met his, provoking a tiny smile before he turned again and walked quickly around the Period of Five Dynasties.
“Where are you headed?” the voice in her ear asked.
“Sorry. No place. I was just. Never mind.”
Mae was allowed, of course, to go where she pleased—her meanderings were what so many watchers appreciated most—but the Additional Guidance office still liked to check in from time to time. As she stood in the sunlight, Circlers all around, she heard her phone ring. She checked her wrist; there was no caller identified. She knew it could only be Kalden.
“Hello?” she said.
“We have to meet,” he said.
“Excuse me?” she asked.
“Your watchers can’t hear me. They only hear you. Right now your engineers are wondering why the incoming audio isn’t working. They’ll fix it in a few minutes.” His voice was tense, shaky. “So listen. Most of what’s happening must stop. I’m serious. The Circle is almost complete and Mae, you have to believe me that this will be bad for you, for me, for humanity. When can we meet? If it has to be in the bathroom that’s fine with me—”
Mae hung up.
“Sorry about that,” said AG through her earpiece. “Somehow the incoming audio wasn’t working. We’re working on it. Who was it?”
Mae knew she couldn’t lie. She wasn’t sure if anyone had indeed heard Kalden. “Some lunatic,” Mae improvised, proud of herself. “Babbling about the end of the world.”
Mae checked her wrist. Already people were wondering what had happened and how. The most popular zing: Tech problems at Circle HQ? Next: Santa forgets Christmas?
“Tell them the truth, as always,” AG said.
“Okay, I have no idea what just happened,” Mae said aloud. “When I do, I’ll let you all know.”
But she was shaken. She was still standing, in the sunlight, waving occasionally to Circlers noticing her. She knew her watchers might wonder what was happening next, where she was going. She didn’t want to check her wrist, knowing that the comments would be perplexed and even concerned. Off in the distance, she saw what looked like a game of croquet, and alighting on an idea, she made her way to it.
“Now, as you all know,” she said when she was close enough to see and wave to the four players, who she realized were two Circlers and a pair of visitors from Russia, “we do not always play here at the Circle. Sometimes we have to work, which this group is demonstrating. I don’t want to disturb them, but I can assure you that what they’re doing involves problem-solving and complex algorithms and will result in the improving of the products and services we can provide to you. Let’s soak this in.”
That would give her a few minutes to think. Periodically, she would focus her lens on something like this, a game or demonstration or speech, and this might allow her mind to wander, while the watchers watched. She checked the view on her wrist, and saw that her watchers, 432,028, were within the average, and there were no urgent comments, so she permitted herself three minutes before she had to retake control of the feed. With a wide smile—for she was surely visible on three or four outdoor SeeChanges—she took a breath. This was a new skill she’d acquired, the ability to look, to the outside world, utterly serene and even cheerful, while, in her skull, all was chaos. She wanted to call Annie. But she couldn’t call Annie. She wanted Kalden. She wanted to be alone with Kalden. She wanted to be back in that bathroom sitting on him, feeling the crown of him push through. But he was not normal. He was some kind of spy here. Some kind of anarchist, doomsayer. What had he meant when he warned of the completion of the Circle? She didn’t even know what Completion meant. No one did. The Wise Men had recently begun to hint about it, though. One day, in new tiles all over campus, cryptic messages had appeared: THINK COMPLETION and COMPLETE THE CIRCLE and THE CIRCLE MUST BE WHOLE, and these slogans had stirred up the desired intrigue. But no one knew what it meant, and the Wise Men weren’t telling.
Mae checked the time. She’d been watching the croquet match for ninety seconds. She could only reasonably hold this pose for another minute or two. So what was her responsibility to report this call? Had anyone actually heard what Kalden had said? What if they had? What if this was some kind of test, to see if she’d report a rogue call? Maybe this was part of Completion—a test like this to measure her loyalty, to thwart anyone or anything that would impede Completion? Oh sh*t, she thought. She wanted to talk to Annie, but she knew she couldn’t. She thought of her parents, who would give good counsel, but their house was transparent, too, full of SeeChange cameras—a condition of her father’s treatment. Maybe she could go there, meet them in the bathroom? No. She hadn’t, actually, been in touch with them for a few days. They had warned her they were having some technical difficulties, would be back in touch soon, that they loved her, and then hadn’t answered any of her messages for the last forty-eight hours. And in that time, she hadn’t checked the cameras in their house. She had to do that. She made a mental note. Maybe she could call them? Make sure they were okay, and then hint, somehow, that she wanted to talk to them about something very unsettling and personal?
No, no. This was all mad. She’d gotten a random call from a man she now knew to be nuts. Oh sh*t, she thought, hoping no one could guess at the chaos in her mind. She relished being where she was, visible like this, a conduit like this, a guide to her watchers, but this responsibility, this unnecessary intrigue, it crippled her. And when she felt this paralysis, caught between entirely too many possibilities and unknowns, there was only one place she felt right.
At 1:44 Mae entered the Renaissance, felt, above her, the greeting of the slowly turning Calder, and took the elevator to the fourth floor. Just rising through the building calmed her. Walking down the catwalk, the atrium visible below, brought her great peace. This, Customer Experience, was home, where there were no unknowns.
At first, Mae had been surprised when they’d asked her to continue working, at least a few hours a week, at CE. She’d enjoyed her time there, yes, but she assumed transparency would mean she’d leave that far behind. “That’s exactly the point,” Bailey had explained. “I think Number One, it’ll keep you connected with the ground-level work you did here. Number Two, I think your followers and viewers will appreciate you continuing to do this essential work. It’ll be a very moving act of humility, don’t you think?”
Mae was at once aware of the power she wielded—instantly, she became one of the three most visible Circlers—and determined to wear it lightly. So Mae had found time in each week to return to her old pod, and to her old desk, which they’d left vacant. There had been changes made—there were now nine screens, and the CEs were encouraged to be delving far deeper with their clients, to reciprocate in far-reaching ways—but the work was essentially the same, and Mae found that she appreciated the rhythm of it, the almost meditative quality of doing something she knew in her bones, and she found herself being drawn to CE at times of stress or calamity.
And so, in her third week of transparency, on a sunny Wednesday, she planned on putting in ninety minutes at CE before the rest of the day overtook her. At three she had to give a tour of the Napoleonic Era, where they were modeling the elimination of physical money—the trackability of internet currency would eliminate huge swaths of crime overnight—and at four, she was supposed to highlight the new musicians’ residences on campus—twenty-two fully equipped apartments where musicians, especially those who couldn’t count on making a living through sales of their music, could live for free and play regularly for the Circlers. That would take her through the afternoon. At five, she was supposed to attend an announcement from the latest politician to go clear. Why they continued to make these proclamations with fanfare—they were now calling them Clarifications—was a mystery to her and many of her watchers. There were tens of thousands of clear elected officials all over the country and world, and the movement was less a novelty and more of an inevitability; most observers predicted full governmental transparency, at least in democracies—and with SeeChange there would soon be no other kind—within eighteen months. After the Clarification, there was an improv comedy battle on campus, a fundraiser for a school in rural Pakistan, a wine tasting, and finally an all-campus barbecue, with music by a Peruvian trance choir.
Mae walked into her old pod room, where her own words—SECRETS ARE LIES; SHARING IS CARING; PRIVACY IS THEFT—had been cast in steel and dominated an entire wall. The place was bursting with newbies, all of whom looked up, alarmed and happy to see her there among them. She waved to them, gave them a theatrical faux-curtsey, saw Jared standing in the doorway to his office, and waved at him, too. Then, determined to do her work without fanfare, Mae sat down, logged on and opened the chute. She answered three queries in rapid succession, with an average of 99. Her fourth client was the first to notice that it was Mae, Transparent Mae, handling her query.
I’m watching you! the client, a media buyer for a sporting-goods importer in New Jersey, wrote. Her name was Janice, and she couldn’t get over the fact she could watch Mae typing the answer to her query in real-time, on her screen, right next to where she was receiving Mae’s typed answer. Hall of mirrors!! she wrote.
After Janice, Mae had a series of clients who did not know it was her answering their queries, and Mae found that this bothered her. One of them, a T-shirt distributor from Orlando named Nanci, asked her to join her professional network, and Mae readily agreed. Jared had told her about a new level of reciprocation encouraged among the CE staff. If you send a survey, be prepared to answer one yourself. And so after she joined the Orlando T-shirt distributor’s professional network, she got another message from Nanci. She asked Mae to respond to a short questionnaire about her preferences in casual apparel, and Mae agreed. She linked to the questionnaire, which she realized was not short; it encompassed fully 120 questions. But Mae was happy to answer them, feeling her opinion mattered and was being heard, and this kind of reciprocation would engender loyalty from Nanci and all who Nanci came into contact with. After she answered the survey questions, Nanci sent her a profuse thank-you, and told her she could choose the T-shirt of her choice, and directed Mae to her consumer site. Mae said she would choose at a later time, but Nanci wrote back, telling Mae that she could not wait to see which shirt Mae would choose. Mae checked her clock; she’d been on the Orlando query for eight minutes, far surpassing the new guideline per query, which was 2.5.
Mae knew she would have to power through the next ten or so queries to get back to an acceptable average. She went to Nanci’s site, chose a shirt that featured a cartoon dog in a superhero costume, and Nanci told her that it was a great choice. Mae then took the next query, and was in the process of an easy boilerplate conversion, when another message came from Nanci. Sorry to be Ms. Sensitive, but after I invited you to choose my professional network, you didn’t ask me to join your professional network, and though I know I’m just a nobody in Orlando, I felt like I had to tell you that it made me feel devalued. Mae told Nanci she had no intentions of making her feel devalued, that things were just busy at the Circle, and that she had spaced on this essential reciprocation, which she quickly remedied. Mae finished her next query, got a 98, and was following up on that one, when she got another message from Nanci. Did you see my message on the professional network? Mae looked at all her feeds and saw no message from Nanci. I posted it on the message board of your professional network! she said. And so Mae went to that page, which she didn’t visit often, and saw that Nanci had written, Hello stranger! Mae typed Hello yourself! But you’re no stranger!! and thought for a moment that that would mean the end of their exchange, but she paused on the page, briefly, with a sense that Nanci was not quite finished. And she wasn’t. So glad you wrote back! Thought you might be offended that I called you ‘Stranger.’ Promise you weren’t peeved? Mae promised Nanci that she was not peeved, answered with an XO, sent her ten subsequent smiles, and went back to her queries, hoping that Nanci was satisfied and happy and that they were cool. She took three more queries, she followed up with surveys, and saw that her average was at 99. This provoked a flurry of congratulatory zings, watchers happy to see Mae’s commitment, still, to the day-to-day tasks at the Circle and essential to the operation of the world. So many of her watchers, they reminded her, were working at desk jobs, too, and because she continued to do this work, voluntarily and with evident joy, they saw her as a role model and inspiration. And this felt good. This felt truly valuable to Mae. The customers made her better. And serving them while transparent made her far better. She expected this. She was apprised by Stewart that when thousands, or even millions, are watching, you perform your best self. You are cheerier, more positive, more polite, more generous, more inquisitive. But he had not told her of the smaller, improving alterations to her behavior.
The first time the camera redirected her actions was when she went to the kitchen for something to eat. The image on her wrist showed the interior of the refrigerator as she scanned for a snack. Normally, she would have grabbed a chilled brownie, but seeing the image of her hand reaching for it, and seeing what everyone else would be seeing, she pulled back. She closed the fridge, and from the bowl on the counter, she selected a packet of almonds, and left the kitchen. Later that day, a headache appeared—caused, she thought, by eating less chocolate than usual. She reached into her bag, where she kept a few single-serving aspirin packets, but again, on her screen, she saw what everyone was seeing. She saw a hand searching her bag, clawing, and instantly she felt desperate and wretched, like some kind of pill-popping addict.
She did without. Every day she’d done without things she didn’t want to want. Things she didn’t need. She’d given up soda, energy drinks, processed foods. At Circle social events, she nursed one drink only, and tried each time to leave it unfinished. Anything immoderate would provoke a flurry of zings of concern, so she stayed within the bounds of moderation. And she found it freeing. She was liberated from bad behavior. She was liberated from doing things she didn’t want to be doing, eating and drinking things that did her no good. Since she’d gone transparent, she’d become more noble. People called her a role model. Mothers said their daughters looked up to her, and this gave her more a feeling of responsibility, and that feeling of responsibility—to the Circlers, to their clients and partners, to the youth who saw inspiration in her—kept her grounded and fueled her days.
She was reminded of the Circle’s own survey questions, and she put on her survey headset and got started. To her watchers she was expressing her opinions constantly, yes, and felt far more influential than before, but something about the tidy rhythm and call-and-response nature of the surveys felt missing. She took another customer query, and then nodded. The distant bell rang. She nodded.
“Thank you. Are you happy with the state of airport security?”
“Thank you. Would you welcome change in airport security procedures?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you.”
“Does the state of airport security dissuade you from flying more often?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you.”
The questions continued, and she was able to get through ninety-four of them before she allowed herself to lapse. Soon the voice arrived, unchanged.
“Mae.”
She ignored it on purpose.
“Mae.”
Her name, spoken by her voice, continued to hold its power over her. And she hadn’t discovered why.
“Mae.”
It sounded, this time, like some purer version of herself.
“Mae.”
She looked down to her bracelet, seeing a number of zings asking if she was okay. She knew she had to respond, lest her watchers think she’d lost her mind. This was one of the many small adjustments she had to get used to—now there were thousands out there seeing what she saw, having access to her health data, hearing her voice, seeing her face—she was always visible through one or another of the campus SeeChange cameras, in addition to the one on her monitor—and so when anything deviated from her normal buoyancy, people noticed.
She wanted to hear it again, so she said nothing.
“Mae.”
It was a young woman’s voice, a young woman’s voice that sounded bright and fierce and capable of anything.
“Mae.”
It was a better, more indomitable version of herself.
“Mae.”
She felt stronger every time she heard it.
She stayed at CE until five, when she showed her watchers the newest Clarification, the governor of Arizona, and enjoyed the surprise transparency of the governor’s entire staff—something that many officials were doing, to ensure to their constituents that deals were not being done, in darkness, outside the light of the clear leader. At the Clarifying event, Mae met up with Renata and Denise and Josiah—these Circlers who had once wielded some power over her and now were her acolytes—and afterward, they all had dinner in the Glass Eatery. There was little reason to leave campus for meals given that Bailey, hoping to engender more discussions and brain-sharing and socialization among Circlers, had instituted a new policy, whereby all food would be not only free, as it always had been, but prepared daily by a different notable chef. The chefs were happy for the exposure—thousands of Circlers smiling, zinging, posting photos—and the program was instantly and wildly popular and the cafeterias were overflowing with people and, presumably, ideas.
Among the bustle that night, Mae ate, feeling unsteady, Kalden’s words and cryptic messages still rattling in her head. She was glad, then, for the distractions of the night. The improv comedy battle was appropriately terrible and funny despite its wall-to-wall incompetence, the Pakistan fundraiser was thoroughly inspiring—the event was able to amass 2.3 million smiles for the school—and finally there was the barbecue, where Mae allowed herself a second glass of wine before settling into her dorm.
The room had been hers for six weeks now. It no longer made sense to drive back to her apartment, which was expensive and, last time she’d been there, after being gone for eight days, had mice. So she gave it up, and became one of the hundred Settlers, Circlers who had moved onto campus permanently. The advantages were obvious and the waiting list was now 1,209 names long. There was room on campus now for 288 Circlers, and the company had just bought a nearby building, a former factory, planning to convert it into 500 more rooms. Mae’s had been upgraded and now had fully smart appliances, wallscreens and shades, everything centrally monitored. The room was cleaned daily and the refrigerator stocked with both her standard items—tracked via Homie—and products in beta. She could have anything she wanted so long as she provided feedback to the manufacturers.
She washed her face and brushed her teeth and settled into the cloud-white bed. Transparency was optional after ten p.m., and she usually went dark after her teeth-brushing, which she found people interested in generally, and, she believed, might promote good dental health among her younger watchers. At 10:11 p.m., she said good-night to her watchers—there were only 98,027 at that point, a few thousand of whom reciprocated her good-night wishes—lifted the lens over her head and placed it in its case. She was allowed to turn off the SeeChange cameras in the room, but she found she rarely did. She knew that the footage she might gather, herself, for instance about movements during sleep, could be valuable someday, so she left the cameras on. It had taken a few weeks to get used to sleeping with her wrist monitors—she’d scratched her face one night, and cracked her right screen another—but Circle engineers had improved the design, replacing the rigid screens with more flexible, unbreakable ones, and now she felt incomplete without them.
She sat up in bed, knowing that it usually took her an hour or so to make her way to sleep. She turned on the wallscreen, planning to check on her parents. But their SeeChange cameras were all dark. She sent them a zing, expecting no answer and getting none. She sent a message to Annie but got no response. She paged through her Zing feed, reading a few funny ones, and, because she’d lost six pounds since going transparent, she spent twenty minutes looking for a new skirt and T-shirt, and somewhere in the eighth site she visited, she felt the tear opening up in her again. For no good reason, she checked to see if Mercer’s site was still down, and found it was. She looked for any recent mention of him online or news of his whereabouts, and found none. The tear was growing within her, opening quickly, a fathomless blackness spreading under her. In her fridge she had some of the sake Francis had introduced her to, so she got up, poured herself far too much, and drank it down. She went to the SeeChange portal and watched feeds from beaches in Sri Lanka and Brazil, feeling calmer, feeling warmer, and then remembered that a few thousand college kids, calling themselves ChangeSeers, had spread themselves all over the planet, installing cameras in the most remote regions. So for a time she watched the view from a camera in a Namibian desert village, a pair of women preparing a meal, their children playing in the background, but after a few minutes watching, she found the tear opening wider, the underwater screams getting louder, an unbearable hiss. She looked again for Kalden, spelling his name in new and irrational ways, scanning, for forty-five minutes, the company directory by face, finding no one like him at all. She turned off the SeeChange cameras, poured more sake, drank it down and got into bed, and, thinking of Kalden and his hands, his thin legs, his long fingers, she circled her nipples with her left hand while, with her right, she moved her underwear to the side and simulated the movements of a tongue, of his tongue. It had no effect. But the sake was draining her mind of worry, and finally, at just before twelve, she found something like sleep.
“Okay, everyone,” Mae said. The morning was bright and she was feeling chipper enough to try out a phrase she hoped might catch on Circle-wide or beyond. “This is a day like every other day, in that it is unlike any other day!” After she said it, Mae checked her wrist, but saw little sign it had struck a nerve. She was momentarily deflated, but the day itself, the unlimited promise it offered, buoyed her. It was 9:34 a.m., the sun was again bright and warm, and the campus was busy and abuzz. If the Circlers needed any confirmation that they were in the middle of everything that mattered, the day had already brought it. Starting at 8:31, a series of helicopters had shaken the campus, bringing leaders from all the major health insurance companies, world health agencies, the Centers for Disease Control, and every significant pharmaceutical company. Finally, it was rumored, there would be complete information-sharing among all of these previously disconnected and even adversarial entities, and when they were coordinated, and once all the health data they’d collected was shared, most of this made possible through the Circle and more importantly, TruYou, viruses could be stopped at their sources, diseases would be tracked to their roots. All morning Mae had watched these executives and doctors and officials stride happily through the grounds, heading for the just-built Hippocampus. There, they’d have a day of meetings—private this time, with public forums promised in the future—and, later, there would be a concert from some aging singer-songwriter only Bailey cared for, who had come in the night before, for dinner with the Wise Men.
Most important for Mae, though, was that one of the many morning helicopters contained Annie, who was finally coming home. She’d been gone for almost a month in Europe and China and Japan, ironing out some regulatory wrinkles, meeting with some of the transparent leaders there, the results of which seemed good, judging from the number of smiles Annie had posted on her Zing feed at the trip’s conclusion. But more meaningful conversation between Mae and Annie had been difficult. Annie had congratulated her on her transparency, on her ascension, as Annie put it, but then had become very busy. Too busy to write notes of consequence, too busy to have phone calls she could be proud of, she’d said. They’d exchanged brief messages every day, but Annie’s schedule had been, in her words, madcap, and the time difference meant they were rarely in sync and able to exchange anything profound.
Annie had promised to arrive in the morning, direct from Beijing, and Mae was having trouble concentrating while waiting. She’d been watching the helicopters land, squinting high on the rooftops, looking for Annie’s yellow head, to no avail. And now she had to spend an hour at the Protagorean Pavilion, a task she knew was important and normally would find fascinating but today felt like an unbreachable wall between herself and her closest friend.
On a granite panel outside the Protagorean Pavilion the building’s namesake was quoted loosely: Humans are the measure of all things. “More important for our purposes,” Mae said, opening the door, “is that now, with the tools available, humans can measure all things. Isn’t that right Terry?”
In front of her stood a tall Korean-American man, Terry Min. “Hello Mae, hello Mae’s watchers and followers.”
“You cut your hair some new way,” Mae said.
With Annie coming back, Mae was feeling loopy, goofy, and Terry was temporarily derailed. He hadn’t counted on ad-libs. “Uh, yeah,” he said, running his fingers through it.
“It’s angular,” Mae said.
“Right. It is more angular. Should we go inside?”
“We should.”
The designers of the building had taken pains to use organic shapes, to soften the rigid math of the engineers’ daily work. The atrium was encased in silver and seemed to undulate, as if they stood at the bottom of an enormous corrugated tube.
“What will we be seeing today, Terry?”
“I thought we’d start with a tour, and then go a bit deeper with some stuff we’re doing for the educational sector.”
Mae followed Terry through the building, which was more of an engineer’s lair than the parts of campus she’d become accustomed to visiting. The trick with her audience was to balance the mundane with the more glamorous parts of the Circle; both were necessary to reveal, and certainly thousands of viewers were more interested in the boiler-rooms than the penthouses, but the calibration had to be precise.
They passed Josef and his teeth, and then said hello to various developers and engineers, each of whom turned to explain their work as best as they could. Mae checked the time and saw there was a new notice from Dr. Villalobos. She asked Mae to come visit as soon as she could. Nothing urgent, she said. But it should be today. As they made their way through the building, Mae typed back to the doctor, saying she’d see her in thirty minutes. “Should we see the education project now?”
“I think that’s a great idea,” Terry said.
They walked through a curving hallway and into a great open space, with at least a hundred Circlers working without division. It looked a bit like a midcentury stock market.
“As your viewers might know,” Terry said, “the Department of Education has given us a nice grant—”
“Wasn’t it three billion dollars?” Mae asked.
“Well, who’s counting?” Terry said, abundantly satisfied with the number and what it demonstrated, which was that Washington knew the Circle could measure anything, including student achievement, better than they ever hope to. “But the point is that they asked us to design and implement a more effective wraparound data assessment system for the nation’s students. Oh wait, this is cool,” Terry said.
They stopped in front of a woman and a small child. He looked about three, and was playing with a very shiny silver watch attached to his wrist.
“Hi Marie,” Terry said to the woman. “This is Mae, as you probably know.”
“I do know Mae,” Marie said in the slightest French accent, “and Michel here does, too. Say hello, Michel.”
Michel chose to wave.
“Say something to Michel, Mae,” Terry said.
“How are you, Michel?” Mae said.
“Okay, now show her,” Terry said, nudging Michel’s shoulder.
On its tiny display, the watch on Michel’s wrist had registered the four words Mae had just said. Below these numbers was a counter, with the number 29,266 displayed.
“Studies show that kids need to hear at least 30,000 words a day,” Marie explained. “So the watch does a very simple thing by recognizing, categorizing and, most crucially, counting those words. This is primarily for kids at home, and before school age. Once they’re there, we’re assuming all this is tracked in the classroom.”
“That’s a good segue,” Terry said. They thanked Marie and Michel, and made their way down the hall to a large room decorated like a classroom but rebooted, with dozens of screens, ergonomic chairs, collaborative workspaces.
“Oh, here’s Jackie,” Terry said.
Jackie, a sleek woman in her mid-thirties, emerged and shook Mae’s hand. She was wearing a sleeveless dress, highlighting her broad shoulders and mannequin arms. She had a small cast on her right wrist.
“Hi Mae, I’m so glad you could visit today.” Her voice was polished, professional, but with something flirtatious in it. She stood in front of the camera, her hands clasped before her.
“So Jackie,” Terry said, clearly enjoying being near her. “Can you tell us a bit about what you’re doing here?”
Mae saw an alert on her wrist, and interrupted. “Maybe first tell us where you came from. Before heading up this project. That’s an interesting story.”
“Well, thank you for saying that, Mae. I don’t know how interesting it is, but before joining the Circle, I was in private equity, and before that I was part of a group that started—”
“You were a swimmer,” Mae prompted. “You were in the Olympics!”
“Oh, that,” Jackie said, throwing a hand in front of her smiling mouth.
“You won a bronze medal in 2000?”
“I did.” Jackie’s sudden shyness was endearing. Mae checked to confirm, and saw the accumulation of a few thousand smiles.
“And you had said internally that your experience as a world-class swimmer informed your plan here?”
“Yes it did, Mae,” Jackie said, now seeming to grasp where Mae was going with the dialogue. “There are so many things we could talk about here in the Protagorean Pavilion, but one interesting one for your viewers is what we’re calling YouthRank. Come over here for a second. Let’s look at the big board.” She led Mae over to a wallscreen, about twenty feet square. “We’ve been testing a system in Iowa for the last few months, and now that you’re here, it seems a good time to demonstrate it. Maybe one of your viewers, if they’re currently in high school in Iowa, would like to send you their name and school?”
“You heard the woman,” Mae said. “Anyone out there watching from Iowa and currently in high school?”
Mae checked her wrist, where eleven zings came through. She showed them to Jackie, who nodded.
“Okay,” Mae said. “So you just need her name?”
“Name and school,” Jackie said.
Mae read one of the zings. “I have here Jennifer Batsuuri, who says she attends Achievement Academy in Cedar Rapids.”
“Okay,” Jackie said, turning back to the wallscreen. “Let’s bring up Jennifer Batsuuri from Achievement Academy.”
The name appeared on the screen, with a school photo accompanying it. The photo revealed her to be an Indian-American girl of about sixteen, with braces and wearing a green and tan uniform. Beside her photo, two numerical counters were spinning, the numbers rising until they slowed and stopped, the upper figure at 1,396, the one below it at 179,827.
“Well, well. Congratulations, Jennifer!” Jackie said, her eyes to the screen. She turned to Mae. “It seems we have a real achiever here from Achievement Academy. She’s ranked 1,396 out of 179,827 high school students in Iowa.”
Mae checked the time. She needed to speed Jackie’s demonstration up. “And this is calculated—”
“Jennifer’s score is the result of comparing her test results, her class rank, her school’s relative academic strength, and a number of other factors.”
“How’s that look to you, Jennifer?” Mae asked. She checked her wrist, but Jennifer’s feed was silent.
There was a brief awkward moment where Mae and Jackie expected Jennifer to return, expressing her joy, but she did not come back. Mae knew it was time to move on.
“And can this be compared against all the other students in the country, and maybe even the world?” she asked.
“That’s the idea,” Jackie said. “Just as within the Circle we know our Participation Rank, for example, soon we’ll be able to know at any given moment where our sons or daughters stand against the rest of American students, and then against the world’s students.”
“That sounds very helpful,” Mae said. “And would eliminate a lot of the doubt and stress out there.”
“Well, think of what this would do for a parent’s understanding of their child’s chances for college admission. There are about twelve thousand spots for Ivy League freshmen every year. If your child is in the top twelve thousand nationally, then you can imagine they’d have a good chance at one of those spots.”
“And it’ll be updated how often?”
“Oh, daily. Once we get full participation from all schools and districts, we’ll be able to keep daily rankings, with every test, every pop quiz incorporated instantly. And of course these can be broken up between public and private, regional, and the rankings can be merged, weighted, and analyzed to see trends among various other factors—socioeconomic, race, ethnicity, everything.”
AG dinged in Mae’s ear. “Ask about how it intersects with TruYouth.”
“Jackie, I understand this overlaps in an interesting way with TruYouth, formerly known as ChildTrack.” Mae got the sentence out just before a wave of nausea and sweat overtook her. She didn’t want to see Francis. Maybe it wouldn’t be Francis? There were other Circlers on the project. She checked her wrist, thinking she might be able to quickly find him with CircleSearch. But then there he was, striding toward her.
“Here’s Francis Garaventa,” Jackie said, oblivious to Mae’s distress, “who can talk about the intersection between YouthRank and TruYouth, which I must say is at once revolutionary and necessary.”
As Francis walked toward them, his hands coyly behind his back, Mae and Jackie both watched him, Mae feeling sweat pool in her armpits and also sensing that Jackie had a more than professional feeling for him. This was a different Francis. He was still shy, still slight, but his smile was confident, as if he’d been recently praised and expected more.
“Hi Francis,” Jackie said, shaking his hand with her unbroken one, and turning her shoulder flirtatiously. It was not apparent to the camera, or to Francis, but to Mae it was as subtle as a gong.
“Hello Jackie, hello Mae,” he said, “can I bring you into my lair?” He smiled, and without waiting for a response, turned and led them into the next room. Mae hadn’t seen his office, and felt conflicted about sharing it with her watchers. It was a dark room with dozens of screens arranged on the wall into a seamless grid.
“So as your watchers might know, we’ve been pioneering a program to make kids safer. In the states where we’ve been testing the program, there’s been an almost 90 percent drop in all crime, and a 100 percent drop in child abductions. Nationwide, we’ve had only three abductions, total, and all were rectified within minutes, given our ability to track the location of the participating children.”
“It’s been just incredible,” Jackie said, shaking her head, her voice low and soaked in something like lust.
Francis smiled at her, oblivious or pretending to be. Mae’s wrist was alive with thousands of smiles and hundreds of comments. Parents in states without YouthTrack were considering moving. Francis was being compared to Moses.
“And meanwhile,” Jackie said, “the crew here at the Protagorean Pavilion has been working to coordinate all student measurements—to make sure that all homework, reading, attendance and test scores are all kept in one unified database. They’re almost there. We’re inches away from the moment when, by the time a student is ready for college, we have complete knowledge of everything that student has learned. Every word they read, every word they looked up, every sentence they highlighted, every equation they wrote, every answer and correction. The guesswork of knowing where all students stand and what they know will be over.”
Mae’s wrist was still scrolling madly. Where was this 20 yrs ago? a watcher wrote. My kids would have gone to Yale.
Now Francis stepped in. The idea that he and Jackie had been rehearsing this made Mae ill. “Now the exciting, and blazingly simple part,” he said, smiling at Jackie with professional respect, “is that we can store all this information in the nearly microscopic chip, which is now used purely for safety reasons. But what if it provides both locational tracking and educational tracking? What if it’s all in one place?”
“It’s a no-brainer,” Jackie said.
“Well, I hope parents will see it that way. For participating families, they’ll have constant and real-time access to everything—location, scores, attendance, everything. And it won’t be in some handheld device, which the kid might lose. It’ll be in the cloud, and in the child him- or herself, never to be lost.”
“Perfection,” Jackie said.
“Well, I hope so,” Francis said, looking at his shoes, hiding in what Mae knew to be a fog of false modesty. “And as you all know,” he said, turning to Mae, speaking to her watchers, “we here at the Circle have been talking about Completion a lot, and though even us Circlers don’t know yet just what Completion means, I have a feeling it’s something like this. Connecting services and programs that are just inches apart. We track kids for safety, we track kids for educational data. Now we’re just connecting these two threads, and when we do, we can finally know the whole child. It’s simple, and, dare I say, it’s complete.”
Mae was standing outside, in the center of the western part of campus, knowing she was stalling until Annie returned. It was 1:44, far later than she thought it would be before her arrival, and now she worried about missing her. Mae had an appointment with Dr. Villalobos at two o’clock, and that might take a while, given the doctor had warned her that there was something relatively serious—but not health-serious, she’d made clear—to talk about. But crowding out thoughts of Annie and the doctor was Francis, who was suddenly, bizarrely, attractive to her again.
Mae knew the easy trick that had been played upon her. He was thin, and without any muscle tone, his eyes were weak, and he had a pronounced problem with premature ejacul*tion, yet simply because she’d seen the lust in Jackie’s eyes, Mae found herself wanting to be alone with him again. She wanted to bring him into her room that night. The thought was demented. She needed to clear her mind. It seemed like an appropriate time to explain and reveal the new sculpture.
“Okay, we have to see this,” Mae said. “This was done by a renowned Chinese artist who’s been in frequent trouble with the authorities there.” At that moment, though, Mae couldn’t remember the artist’s name. “While we’re on the subject, I want to thank all the watchers who sent frowns to the government there, both for their persecution of this artist, and for their restrictions on internet freedoms. We’ve sent over 180 million frowns from the U.S. alone, and you can bet that has an effect on the regime.”
Mae still couldn’t retrieve the artist’s name and felt the omission was about to be noticed. Then it came through her wrist. Say the man’s name! And they provided it.
She directed her lens toward the sculpture, and a few Circlers, standing between her and the piece, stepped out of the way. “No, no, it’s good,” Mae said. “You guys help show the scale of it. Stay there,” she said, and they stepped back toward the object, which dwarfed them.
The sculpture was fourteen feet high, made of a thin and perfectly translucent form of plexiglass. Though most of the artist’s previous work had been conceptual, this was representational, unmistakable: a massive hand, as big as a car, was reaching out from, or through, a large rectangle, which most took to imply some sort of computer screen.
The title of the piece was Reaching Through for the Good of Humankind, and had been noted, immediately upon its introduction, for its earnestness, anomalous to the artist’s typical work, which had a darkly sardonic tone, usually at the expense of rising China and its attendant sense of self-worth.
“This sculpture is really hitting the Circlers at their core,” Mae said. “I’ve been hearing about people weeping before it. As you can see, people like to take photos.” Mae had seen Circlers posing before the giant hand, as if it were reaching for them, about to take them, elevate them. Mae decided to interview the two people who were standing near the sculpture’s outstretched fingers.
“And you are?”
“Gino. I work in the Machine Age.”
“And what does this sculpture mean to you?”
“Well, I’m not an art expert, but I think it’s pretty obvious. He’s trying to say that we need more ways to reach through the screen, right?”
Mae was nodding, because this was the clear meaning for everyone on campus, but she felt it might as well be said, on camera, for anyone less adept at art interpretation. Efforts to contact the artist after its installation had been unsuccessful. Bailey, who had commissioned the work, said he had no hand—“you know me and puns,” he said—in its theme or execution. But he was thrilled with the result, and dearly wanted the artist to come to the campus to talk about the sculpture, but the artist had said he was unable to come in person, or even to teleconference. He’d rather let the sculpture speak for itself, he said. Mae turned to the woman with him.
“Who are you?”
“Rinku. Also from the Machine Age.”
“Do you agree with Gino?”
“I do. I mean, this feels very soulful to me. Like, in how we need to find more ways to connect. The screen here is a barrier, and the hand is transcending it…”
Mae was nodding, thinking she needed to wrap this up, when she saw, through the translucent wrist of the giant hand, someone who looked like Annie. It was a young woman, blond, about Annie’s height and build, and she was walking briskly across the quad. Rinku was still talking, having warmed up.
“I mean, how can the Circle find a way to make the connection between us and our users stronger? To me it’s incredible that this artist, so far away and from such a different world, expressed what was on the minds of all of us here at the Circle? How to do better, do more, reach further, you know? How do we throw our hands through the screen to get closer to the world and everyone in it?”
Mae was watching the Annie-like figure walk into the Industrial Revolution. When the door closed, and Annie, or Annie’s twin, disappeared within, Mae smiled at Rinku, thanked her and Gino, and checked the time.
It was 1:49. She had to be with Dr. Villalobos in eleven minutes.
“Annie!”
The figure continued to walk. Mae was torn between really yelling, which typically upset the viewers, or running after Annie, which would cause the camera to shake violently—which also upset the viewers. She settled on a kind of speed walking while holding the camera against her chest. Annie turned another corner and then was gone. Mae heard the click of a door, the door to a stairway, and rushed to it. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought Annie was avoiding her.
When Mae entered the stairway, she looked up, saw Annie’s distinctive hand, and yelled up. “Annie!”
Now the figure stopped. It was Annie. She turned, slowly made her way down the steps, and when she saw Mae, she smiled a practiced, exhausted smile. They hugged, Mae knowing any embrace always provided for her viewers a semi-comical, and occasionally mildly erotic, moment, as the other hugger’s body swooped toward and eventually subsumed the camera’s lens.
Annie pulled back, looked down at the camera, stuck out her tongue and looked up at Mae.
“Everyone,” Mae said, “this is Annie. You’ve heard about her—Gang of 40 member, world-strider, beautiful colossus and my close personal friend. Say hi, Annie.”
“Hi,” Annie said.
“So how was the trip?” Mae asked.
Annie smiled, though Mae could tell, through the briefest of grimaces, that Annie was not enjoying this. But she conjured a happy mask and put it on. “It was great,” she said.
“Anything you’d like to share? How did things go with everyone in Geneva?”
Annie’s smile wilted.
“Oh, you know we shouldn’t talk about much of that stuff, given so much of it is—”
Mae nodded, assuring Annie she knew. “I’m sorry. I was just talking about Geneva as a location. Nice?”
“Sure,” Annie said. “Just great. I saw the Von Trapps, and they’ve gotten some new clothes. Also made of drapes.”
Mae glanced at her wrist. She had nine minutes until she had to see Dr. Villalobos.
“Anything else you’d like to talk about?” she asked.
“What else?” Annie said. “Well let me think…”
Annie tilted her head, as if surprised, and mildly annoyed, that this faux-visit was still continuing. But then something came over her, as if finally settling into what was happening—that she was stuck on camera and had to assume her mantle as company spokesperson.
“Okay, there’s another very cool program that we’ve been hinting at for a while, a system called PastPerfect. And in Germany I was working out some last hurdles to help it happen. We’re currently looking for the right volunteer here within the Circle to try it out, but when we find the right person, it’ll mean the start of a very new era for the Circle, and, not to be overly dramatic about it, for humankind.”
“Not dramatic at all!” Mae said. “Can you say anything more about it?”
“Sure, Mae. Thank you for asking,” Annie said, looking briefly at her shoes before raising her eyes back to Mae, with a professional smile. “I can say that the basic idea is to take the power of the Circle community and to map not just the present but the past, too. We’re right now digitizing every photo, every newsreel, every amateur video in every archive in this country and Europe—I mean, we’re doing our best at least. The task is herculean, but once we have a critical mass, and with facial recognition advances, we can, we hope, identify pretty much everyone in every photo and every video. You want to find every picture of your great-grandparents, we can make the archive searchable, and you can—we expect, we bet—then gain a greater understanding of them. Maybe you catch them in a crowd at the 1912 World’s Fair. Maybe you find video of your parents at a baseball game in 1974. The hope, in the end, is to fill in your memory and the historical record. And with the help of DNA and far better genealogical software, within the year we’re hoping that anyone can quickly access every available piece of information about their family lineage, all images, all video and film, with one search request.”
“And I imagine that when everyone else joins in, the Circle participants that is, the gaps will quickly be filled.” Mae smiled, her eyes telling Annie she was doing great.
“That’s right, Mae,” Annie said, her voice stabbing at the space between them, “like any project online, most of the completion will be done by the digital community. We’re gathering our own millions of photos and videos, but the rest of the world will provide billions more. We expect that with even partial participation, we’ll be able to fill in most historical holes easily. If you’re looking for all the residents of a certain building in Poland, circa 1913, and you’re missing one, it won’t take long to triangulate that last person by cross-referencing from all the other data we’ll get.”
“Very exciting.”
“Yes, it is,” Annie said, and flashed the whites of her eyes, urging Mae to wrap all this up.
“But you don’t have the guinea pig yet?” Mae asked.
“Not yet. For the first person, we’re looking for someone whose family goes back pretty far in the United States. Just because we know we’ll have more complete access to records here than in some other countries.”
“And this is part of the Circle’s plan to complete everything this year? It’s still on schedule?”
“It is. PastPerfect is just about ready to use now. And with all the other aspects of Completion, it looks like the beginning of next year. Eight months and we’ll be done. But you never know: the way things are going, with the help of so many Circlers out there, we could finish ahead of time.”
Mae smiled, nodded, and she and Annie shared a long, strained moment, when Annie’s eyes again asked how long they needed to go on with this semiperformative dialogue.
Outside, the sun broke through the clouds, and the light through the window shone down on Annie’s face. Mae saw, then, for the first time, how old she looked. Her face was drawn, her skin pale. Annie was not yet twenty-seven but there were bags under her eyes. In this light, she seemed to have aged five years in the last two months.
Annie took Mae’s hand, and dug her fingernails into her palm just enough to get her attention. “I actually have to use the bathroom. Come with?”
“Sure. I have to go, too.”
Though Mae’s transparency was complete, in that she could not turn off the visual or audio feeds at any time, there were a few exceptions, insisted upon by Bailey. One was during bathroom usage, or at least time spent on the toilet. The video feed was to remain on, because, Bailey insisted, the camera would be trained on the back of the stall door, so it hardly mattered. But the audio would be turned off, sparing Mae, and the audience, the sounds.
Mae entered the stall, Annie entered the one next to her, and Mae deactivated her audio. The rule was that she had up to three minutes of silence; more than that would provoke concern from viewers and Circlers alike.
“So how are you?” Mae asked. She couldn’t see Annie, but her toes, looking crooked and in need of a pedicure attention, were visible under the door.
“Great. Great. You?”
“Good.”
“Well, you should be good,” Annie said. “You are killing it!”
“You think?”
“C’mon. False modesty won’t work here. You should be psyched.”
“Okay. I am.”
“I mean, you’re like a meteor here. It’s insane. People are coming to me trying to get to you. It’s just…so crazy.”
Something had crept into Annie’s voice that Mae recognized as envy, or its close cousin. Mae ran through a string of possibilities of what she could say in response. Nothing was right. I couldn’t have done it without you would not work; it sounded both self-aggrandizing and condescending. In the end, she chose to change the subject.
“Sorry about asking stupid questions back there,” Mae said.
“It’s okay. But you put me on the spot.”
“I know. I just—I saw you and wanted to spend time with you. And I didn’t know what else to ask about. So are you really okay? You look wiped out.”
“Thank you, Mae. You know how much I like to be told seconds after I appear in front of your millions that I look terrible. Thank you. You’re sweet.”
“I’m just worried. Have you been sleeping?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m off-schedule. I’m jet-lagged.”
“Is there anything I can do? Let me take you out to eat.”
“Take me out to eat? With your camera and me looking so terrible? That sounds fantastic, but no.”
“Let me do something for you.”
“No, no. I just need to get caught up.”
“Anything interesting?”
“Oh you know, the usual.”
“The regulatory stuff went well? They were really putting a lot on you out there. I worried.”
A chill swept through Annie’s voice. “Well, you had no reason to worry. I’ve been doing this for a while now.”
“I didn’t mean I was worried in that way.”
“Well, don’t worry in any way.”
“I know you can handle it.”
“Thank you! Mae, your confidence in me will be the wind beneath my wings.”
Mae chose to ignore the sarcasm. “So when do I get to see you?”
“Soon. We’ll make something happen.”
“Tonight? Please?”
“Not tonight. I’m just gonna crash and get fresh for tomorrow. I have a bunch of stuff. There’s all the new work on Completion, and…”
“Completing the Circle?”
There was a long pause, during which Mae was sure that Annie was relishing this piece of news, unknown to Mae.
“Yeah. Bailey didn’t tell you?” Annie said. A certain exasperating music had entered her voice.
“I don’t know,” Mae said, her heart burning. “Maybe he did.”
“Well, they’re feeling very close now. I was out there removing some of the last barriers. The Wise Men think we’re down to the last few hurdles.”
“Oh. I think I might have heard that,” Mae said, hearing herself, hearing how petty she sounded. But she was jealous. Of course she was. Why would she have access to information that Annie did? She knew she had no right to it, but still, she wanted it, and felt she was closer to it than this, than hearing about it from Annie, who had been halfway around the world for three weeks. The omission threw her back to some ignominious spot at the Circle, some plebeian place of being a spokeswoman, a public shill.
“So you’re sure I can’t do anything for you? Maybe some kind of mudpack to help with the puffiness under your eyes?” Mae hated herself for saying it, but it felt so good in that moment, like an itch scratched hard.
Annie cleared her throat. “You’re so kind,” she said. “But I should get going.”
“You sure?”
“Mae. I don’t want this to sound rude, but the best thing for me right now is to get back to my desk so I can get back to work.”
“Okay.”
“I’m not saying that in a rude way. I actually just need to get caught up.”
“No, I know. I get it. That’s fine. I’ll see you tomorrow anyway. At the Concept Kingdom meeting.”
“What?”
“There’s a Concept King—”
“No. I know what it is. You’re going?”
“I am. Bailey thought I should go.”
“And broadcast it?”
“Of course. Is that a problem?”
“No. No,” Annie said, clearly stalling, processing. “I’m just surprised. Those meetings are full of sensitive intellectual property. Maybe he’s planning to have you attend the beginning or something. I can’t imagine…”
Annie’s toilet flushed, and Mae saw that she’d stood up.
“You leaving?”
“Yeah. I’m really so late I want to puke now.”
“Okay. Don’t puke.”
Annie hurried to the door and was gone.
Mae had four minutes to get to Dr. Villalobos. She stood, turned her audio back on, and left the bathroom.
Then she walked back in, silenced her audio, sat down in the same stall, and gave herself a minute to get herself together. Let people think she was constipated. She didn’t care. She was sure Annie was crying by now, wherever she was. Mae was sobbing, and was cursing Annie, cursing every blond inch of her, her smug sense of entitlement. So what that she’d been at the Circle longer. They were peers now, but Annie couldn’t accept it. Mae would have to make sure she did.
“Hello Mae,” Dr. Villalobos said, greeting her in the clinic lobby. “I see your heart rate is normal, and I imagine with your jog over here, all your viewers are getting some interesting data, too. Come in.”
In retrospect, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that Dr. Villalobos had become a viewers’ favorite, too. With her extravagant curves, her sultry eyes and harmonica voice, she was volcanic onscreen. She was the doctor everyone, especially straight men, wished they’d had. Though TruYou had made lewd comments almost impossible for anyone wanting to keep their job or spouse, Dr. Villalobos brought out a genteel, but no less demonstrative, brand of appreciation. So good to see the good doctor! one man wrote as Mae entered the office. Let the examination begin, said another, braver, soul. And Dr. Villalobos, while putting on a show of brisk professionalism, seemed to enjoy it, too. Today she was wearing a zippered blouse that displayed an amount of her ample chest that at a proper distance was appropriate but, seen through Mae’s close camera, was somehow obscene.
“So your vitals have been looking good,” she said to Mae.
Mae was sitting on the examination table, the doctor standing before her. Looking at her wrist, Mae checked the image her viewers were getting, and she knew the men would be pleased. As if realizing the picture might be getting too provocative, Dr. Villalobos turned to the wallscreen. On it, a few hundred data points were displayed.
“Your step count could be better,” she said. “You’re averaging only 5,300, when you should be at 10,000. Someone your age, especially, should be even higher than that.”
“I know,” Mae said. “It’s just been busy lately.”
“Okay. But let’s bring those steps up. As a promise to me? Now, because we’re talking to all your watchers now, I’d like to tout the overall program your own data feeds into, Mae. It’s called the Complete Health Data program, or CHAD for short. Chad was an ex of mine, and Chad, if you’re out there, I didn’t name it for you.”
Mae’s wrist went wild with messages. Chad, you fool.
“Through CHAD, we get real-time data on everyone at the Circle. Mae, you and the newbies were the first to get the new wristbands, but since then, we’ve equipped everyone else at the Circle. And this has enabled us to get perfect and complete data on the eleven thousand people here. Can you imagine? The first boon has been that when the flu arrived on campus last week, we knew in minutes who brought it. We sent her home and no one else was infected. If only we could prevent people from bringing germs onto campus, right? If they never left, getting dirty out there, then we’d be all set. But let me get off my soapbox and focus on you, Mae.”
“As long as the news is good,” Mae said, and tried to smile. But she was uneasy and wanted to move all this along.
“Well, I think it’s good,” the doctor said. “This comes from a watcher in Scotland. He’d been tracking your vitals, and cross-referencing with your DNA markers, he realized that the way you’re eating, particularly nitrates, is elevating your propensity for cancer.”
“Jesus. Really? Is that the bad news I’m here for?”
“No, no! Don’t worry. It’s easily solved. You don’t have cancer and probably won’t get it. But you know you have a marker for gastrointestinal cancer, just an increased risk, and this researcher in Glasgow, who’d been following you and your vitals, saw that you’re eating salami and other meats with nitrates that might be tipping you toward cellular mutation.”
“Oh god I’m sorry! I don’t mean to. But thank god he was watching. I mean, we’re watching, too, and we’re getting better at watching all the time. But the beauty of having so many friends out there, as you do, is that one of them, five thousand miles away, has helped you avert a growing risk.”
“So no more nitrates.”
“Right. Let’s skip the nitrates. I’ve zinged you a list of foods that contain them, and your watchers can see, too. They should always be eaten in moderation, but should be avoided altogether if there’s any history of or risk of cancer. I hope you’ll be sure to convey this to your parents, in case they haven’t been checking their own Zing feed.”
“Oh, I’m sure they have,” Mae said.
“Okay, and this is the not-so-good news. It’s not about you or your health. It’s your parents. They’re fine, but I want to show you something.” The doctor brought up the SeeChange camera feeds in Mae’s parents’ house, set up a month into her father’s treatment. The medical team at the Circle was taking a strong interest in her father’s case, and wanted as much data as it could get. “You see anything wrong?”
Mae scanned the screen. Where a grid of sixteen images should have been visible, twelve were blank. “There are only four working,” she said.
“Correct,” said the doctor.
Mae watched the four feeds for signs of her parents. She saw none. “Has tech been there to check?”
“No need. We saw them do it. For each one, they reached up and put some kind of cover over them. Maybe just some sticker or fabric. Did you know about this?”
“I didn’t. I’m so sorry. They shouldn’t have done this.”
Instinctively, Mae checked her current viewership: 1,298,001. It always spiked during the visits to Dr. Villalobos. Now all these people knew. Mae felt her face flush.
“Have you heard from your folks recently?” Dr. Villalobos asked. “Our records say you haven’t. But maybe—”
“Not in the last few days,” Mae said. In fact, she hadn’t been in touch for over a week. She’d tried to call them, to no avail. She’d zinged and received no response.
“Would you be willing to go visit?” the doctor asked. “As you know, good medical care is hard to provide when we’re in the dark.”
Mae was driving home, having left work at five—something she hadn’t done in weeks—and was thinking of her parents, what kind of madness had overtaken them, and she was worried that somehow Mercer’s own madness had infected them. How dare they disconnect cameras! After all she’d done to help, after all the Circle had done to bend all rules to come to their aid! And what would Annie say?
Damn her, Mae thought as she made her way home, the air growing warmer as the distance grew between her and the Pacific. Mae had set up her lens on the car dash, inserting it into a special mount created for her time in the car. That f*cking debutante. This was bad timing. Annie would likely find some way to turn all this to her advantage. Just when her envy of Mae—and it was that, it was so abundantly obvious—was growing, she could cut Mae down to size again. Mae and her nothing town, her parking-garage parents who couldn’t keep their screens operational, who couldn’t keep themselves healthy. Who took a monumental gift, premium health care, for free, and abused it. Mae knew what Annie was thinking in her little entitled blond head: You just can’t help some people.
Annie’s family line went back to the Mayflower, her ancestors having settled this country, and their ancestors having owned some vast swath of England. Their blood was blue all the way back, it seemed, to the invention of the wheel. In fact, if anyone’s bloodline had invented the wheel, it would have been Annie’s. It would make absolute and perfect sense and would surprise no one.
Mae had discovered all this one Thanksgiving at Annie’s house, with twenty-odd relatives there, all with their thin noses, their pink skin, their weak eyes hidden behind forty lenses, when she became aware, during an appropriately self-effacing conversation—for Annie’s family was equally unwilling to talk too much or care too much about their lineage—that some distant relative of theirs had been at the very first Thanksgiving.
“Oh god, who cares?” Annie’s mother had said, when Mae had pressed for more details. “Some random guy got on a boat. He probably owed money all over the Old Country.”
And they had proceeded with dinner. Afterward, Annie had, at Mae’s insistence, shown her some documents, ancient yellowed papers detailing their family history, a beautiful black portfolio of genealogies, scholarly articles, pictures of grave old men with extravagant sideburns standing near rough-hewn cabins.
In other visits to Annie’s house, her family was equally generous, unassuming and careless with their name. But when Annie’s sister was married, and the extended family arrived, Mae saw a different side. She was seated at a table of single men and women, most of them Annie’s cousins, and next to Annie’s aunt. She was a wiry woman in her forties, her features similar to Annie’s but arranged with lesser results. She was recently divorced, having left a man “beneath my station,” she said with pretend haughtiness.
“And you know Annie from…?” She’d first turned to Mae fully twenty minutes into dinner.
“College. We were roommates.”
“I thought her roommate was Pakistani.”
“That was freshman year.”
“And you saved the day. Where are you from?”
“Middle of the state. Central Valley. A small town no one’s heard of. Sort of near Fresno.”
Mae drove on, remembering all this, some of it injecting fresh pain into her, something still wet and raw.
“Wow, Fresno!” the aunt had said, pretending to smile. “I haven’t heard that word in a long time, thank god.” She’d taken a swallow from her gin and tonic and squinted out at the wedding party. “The important thing is that you got out. I know good colleges look for people like you. That’s probably why I didn’t get in where I wanted to. Don’t let anyone tell you Exeter helps. So many quota spots to fill with people from Pakistan and Fresno, right?”
The first time she’d gone home transparent had been revelatory and had burnished Mae’s faith in humanity. She’d had a simple evening with her parents, making and eating dinner and while doing so, they’d discussed the differences in her father’s treatment before and after they became insured through the Circle. Viewers could see both the triumphs of his treatment—her father seemed vibrant and moved with ease through the house—but they also saw the toll the disease was taking on him. He fell awkwardly while trying to make his way upstairs, and afterward there was a flood of messages from concerned viewers, followed by thousands of smiles from all over the world. People suggesting new drug combinations, new physical therapy regimens, new doctors, experimental treatments, Eastern medicine, Jesus. Hundreds of churches put him in their weekly prayers. Mae’s parents felt confident in their doctors, and most viewers could see that her father’s care was exceptional, so what was more important and plentiful than the medical comments were those simply cheering him and the family on. Mae cried reading the messages; it was a flood of love. People sharing their own stories, so many living with MS themselves. Others spoke of their own struggles—living with osteoporosis, with Bell’s palsy, with Crohn’s disease. Mae had been forwarding the messages to her parents, but after a few days decided to make their own email and mailing address public, so her parents could be emboldened and inspired by the outpouring themselves, every day.
This, the second time she’d gone home, would, she knew, be even better. After she addressed the issue with the cameras, which she expected was some sort of misunderstanding, she planned to give all those who had reached out the chance to see her parents again, and to give her parents a chance to thank all those who had sent them smiles and help.
She found the two of them in the kitchen, chopping vegetables.
“How are you guys?” she said, while forcing them into a three-way embrace. They both smelled of onions.
“You’re sure affectionate tonight, Mae!” her father said.
“Ha ha,” Mae said, and tried to indicate, with a rolling back of her eyelids, that they should not imply that she was ever less affectionate.
As if remembering that they were on camera, and that their daughter was now a more visible and important person, her parents adjusted their behavior. They made lasagna, with Mae adding a few ingredients Additional Guidance had asked her to bring and display to watchers. When dinner was ready, and Mae had given adequate camera time to the products, they all sat down.
“So there’s a slight concern from the health folks that some of your cameras aren’t working,” Mae said, keeping it light.
“Really?” her father said, smiling. “Maybe we should check the batteries?” He winked at her mother.
“You guys,” Mae said, knowing she had to make this statement very clear, knowing this was a pivotal moment, for their own health and the overall health data-gathering system the Circle was trying to make possible. “How can anyone provide you with good health care when you don’t allow them to see how you’re doing? It’s like going to see a doctor and not allowing her to take your pulse.”
“That’s a very good point,” her father said. “I think we should eat.”
“We’ll get them fixed right away,” her mother said, and that began what was a very strange night, during which Mae’s parents agreed readily with all of Mae’s arguments about transparency, nodded their heads vigorously when she talked about the necessity for everyone to be onboard, the corollary to vaccines, how they only worked with full participation. They agreed heartily with it all, complimenting Mae repeatedly on her powers of persuasion and logic. It was odd; they were being far too cooperative.
They sat down to eat, and Mae did something she’d never done before, and which she hoped her parents wouldn’t ruin by acting like it was unusual: she gave a toast.
“Here’s a toast to you two,” she said. “And while we’re at it, a toast to all the thousands of people who reached out to you guys after the last time I was here.”
Her parents smiled stiffly and raised their glasses. They ate for a few moments, and when her mother had carefully chewed and swallowed her first bite, she smiled and looked directly into the lens—which Mae had told her repeatedly not to do.
“Well, we sure did get a lot of messages,” her mother said.
Mae’s father joined in. “Your mom’s been sorting through them, and we’ve been making a little dent in the pile every day. But it’s a lot of work, I have to say.”
Her mother rested her hand on Mae’s arm. “Not that we don’t appreciate it, because we do. We surely do. I just want to go on record as asking everyone’s forgiveness for our tardiness in answering all the messages.”
“We’ve gotten thousands,” her father noted, poking at his salad.
Her mother smiled stiffly. “And again, we appreciate the outpouring. But even if we spent one minute on each response, that’s a thousand minutes. Think of it: sixteen hours just for some basic response to the messages! Oh jeez, now I sound ungrateful.”
Mae was glad her mother said this, because they did sound ungrateful. They were complaining about people caring about them. And just when Mae thought her mother would reverse herself, would encourage more good wishes, her father spoke and made it worse. Like her mother, he spoke directly into the lens.
“But we do ask you, from now on, to just send your best wishes through the air. Or if you pray, just pray for us. No need to put it into a message. Just”—and he closed his eyes and squeezed them tight—“send your good wishes, your good vibes, our way. No need to email or zing or anything. Just good thoughts. Send ’em through the air. That’s all we ask.”
“I think you just mean to say,” Mae said, trying to hold her temper, “that it’ll just take you a little while to answer all of the messages. But you’ll get to them all eventually.”
Her father didn’t hesitate. “Well, I can’t say that, Mae. I don’t want to promise that. It’s actually very stressful. And we’ve already had many people get angry when they don’t hear back from us in a given amount of time. They send one message, then they send ten more in the same day. ‘Did I say something wrong?’ ‘Sorry.’ ‘I was only trying to help.’ ‘Up yours.’ They have these neurotic conversations with themselves. So I don’t want to imply the kind of immediate message turnaround that most of your friends seem to require.”
“Dad. Stop. You sound terrible.”
Her mother leaned forward. “Mae, your dad’s just trying to say that our lives are already pretty fraught, and we have our hands full just working, paying bills and taking care of the health stuff. If we have sixteen hours more work to do, then that puts us in an untenable position. Can you see where we’re coming from? I say that, again, with all due respect and gratitude to everyone who has wished us well.”
After dinner, her parents wanted to watch a movie, and they did so, Basic Instinct, at her father’s insistence. He’d seen it more than any other film, always citing the nods to Hitchco*ck, the many witty homages—though he’d never made clear his love of Hitchco*ck in the first place. Mae had long suspected that the movie, with its constant and varied sexual tensions, made him randy.
As her parents watched the film, Mae tried to make the time more interesting by sending a series of zings about it, tracking and commenting on the number of moments offensive to the LGBT community. She was getting a great response, but then saw the time, 9:30, and figured she should get on the road and back to the Circle.
“Well, I’m gonna head out,” she said.
Mae thought she caught something in her father’s eye, some quick look to her mother that might have said at last, but she could have been mistaken. She put on her coat and her mother met her at the door, an envelope in her hand.
“Mercer asked us to give this to you.”
Mae took it, a simple business-sized envelope. It wasn’t even addressed to her. No name, nothing.
She kissed her mother’s cheek, left the house, the air outside still warm. She pulled out and drove toward the highway. But the letter was on her lap, and her curiosity overtook her. She pulled over and opened it.
Dear Mae,
Yes, you can and should read this on camera. I expected that you would, so I’m writing this letter not only to you, but to your “audience.” Hello, audience.
She could almost hear his introductory intake of breath, his settling in before an important speech.
I can’t see you anymore, Mae. Not that we had such a constant or perfect friendship anyway, but I can’t be your friend and also part of your experiment. I’ll be sad to lose you, as you have been important in my life. But we’ve taken very different evolutionary paths and very soon we’ll be too far apart to communicate.
If you saw your parents, and your mom gave you this note, then you saw the effect all your stuff has had on them. I wrote this note after seeing them, both of them strung out, exhausted by the deluge you unleashed on them. It’s too much, Mae. And it’s not right. I helped them cover some of the cameras. I even bought the fabric. I was happy to do it. They don’t want to be smiled upon, or frowned upon, or zinged. They want to be alone. And not watched. Surveillance shouldn’t be the tradeoff for any goddamn service we get.
If things continue this way, there will be two societies—or at least I hope there will be two—the one you’re helping create, and an alternative to it. You and your ilk will live, willingly, joyfully, under constant surveillance, watching each other always, commenting on each other, voting and liking and disliking each other, smiling and frowning, and otherwise doing nothing much else.
Already there were comments pouring through her wrist. Mae, were you ever so young and dumb? How did you end up dating a zero like this? That was the most popular, soon superseded by Just looked up his picture. Does he have some Sasquatch somewhere in the family tree?
She continued reading the letter:
I will always wish all good things for you, Mae. I also hope, though I realize how unlikely it is, that somewhere down the line, when the triumphalism of you and your peers—the unrestrained Manifest Destiny of it all—goes too far and collapses into itself, that you’ll regain your sense of perspective, and your humanity. Hell, what am I saying? It’s already gone too far. What I should say is that I await the day when some vocal minority finally rises up to say it’s gone too far, and that this tool, which is far more insidious than any human invention that’s come before it, must be checked, regulated, turned back, and that, most of all, we need options for opting out. We are living in a tyrannical state now, where we are not allowed to—
Mae checked how many pages were left. Four more double-sided sheets, likely containing more of the same directionless blather. She threw the pile on the passenger seat. Poor Mercer. He’d always been a blowhard, and he never knew his audience. And though she knew he was using her parents against her, something was bothering her. Were they really that annoyed? She was only a block away, so she got out and walked back home. If they were truly upset, well, she would and could address it.
When she walked in, she didn’t see them in the two most likely places, the living room and the kitchen, and peeked around the corner into the dining room. They were nowhere. The only sign of them at all was a pot of water boiling on the stove. She tried not to panic, but that pot of boiling water, and the otherwise eerie quiet of the house, arranged itself in a crooked way in her mind, and very suddenly she was thinking of robberies, or suicide pacts, or kidnappings.
She ran up the stairs, taking them three at a time, and when she reached the top and turned left quickly, into their bedroom, she saw them, their eyes turned to her, round and terrified. Her father was sitting on the bed, and her mother was kneeling on the floor, his penis in her hand. A small container of moisturizer rested against his leg. In an instant they all knew the ramifications.
Mae turned away, directing the camera toward a dresser. No one said a word. Mae could think only of retreating to the bathroom, where she pointed the camera at the wall and turned off the audio. She rewound her spool to see what had been caught on camera. She hoped the lens swinging from her neck had somehow missed the offending image.
But it had not. If anything, the angle of the camera revealed the act more clearly than she’d witnessed it. She turned the playback off. She called AG.
“Is there anything we can do?” she asked.
Within minutes she was on the phone with Bailey himself. She was glad to get him, because she knew that if anyone would agree with her on this, it would be Bailey, a man of unerring moral compass. He didn’t want a sex act like that broadcast around the world, did he? Well, that had already been done, but surely they could erase a few seconds, so the image wouldn’t be searchable, wouldn’t be made permanent?
“Mae, c’mon,” he said. “You know we can’t do that. What would transparency be if we could delete anything we felt was embarrassing in some way? You know we don’t delete.” His voice was empathetic and fatherly, and Mae knew she would abide by whatever he said. He knew best, could see miles further than Mae or anyone else, and this was evident in his preternatural calm. “For this experiment, Mae, and the Circle as a whole, to work, it has to be absolute. It has to be pure and complete. And I know this episode will be painful for a few days, but trust me, very soon nothing like this will be the least bit interesting to anyone. When everything is known, everything acceptable will be accepted. So for the time being, we need to be strong. You need to be a role model here. You need to stay the course.”
Mae drove back to the Circle, determined that when she got back to campus, she would stay there. She’d had enough of the chaos of her family, of Mercer, her wretched hometown. She hadn’t even asked her parents about the SeeChange cameras, had she? Home was madness. On campus, all was familiar. On campus there was no friction. She didn’t need to explain herself, or the future of the world, to the Circlers, who implicitly understood her and the planet and the way it had to be and soon would be.
Increasingly, she found it difficult to be off-campus anyway. There were homeless people, and there were the attendant and assaulting smells, and there were machines that didn’t work, and floors and seats that had not been cleaned, and there was, everywhere, the chaos of an orderless world. The Circle was helping to improve it, she knew, and so many of these things were being addressed—homelessness could be helped or fixed, she knew, once the gamificaton of shelter allotment and public housing in general was complete; they were working on this in the Nara Period—but in the meantime, it was increasingly troubling to be amid the madness outside the gates of the Circle. Walking through San Francisco, or Oakland, or San Jose, or any city, really, seemed more and more like a Third World experience, with unnecessary filth, and unnecessary strife and unnecessary errors and inefficiencies—on any city block, a thousand problems correctible through simple enough algorithms and the application of available technology and willing members of the digital community. She left her camera on.
She made the drive in less than two hours and it was only midnight when she arrived. She was wired from the trip, from her nerves on constant alert, and needed relaxation, and distraction. She went to CE, knowing there she could be useful and that there, her efforts would be appreciated, immediately and demonstrably. She entered the building, looking briefly up at the slow-turning Calder, and rose through the elevator, breezed across the catwalk and to her old station.
At her desk, she saw a pair of messages from her parents. They were still awake, and they were despondent. They were outraged. Mae tried to send them the positive zings she’d seen, messages that celebrated that an older couple, dealing with MS no less, could still be sexually active. But they weren’t interested.
Please stop, they asked. Please, no more.
And they, like Mercer, insisted that she cease to contact them unless privately. She tried to explain to them that they were on the wrong side of history. But they weren’t listening. Mae knew that eventually she’d convince them, that it was only a matter of time, for them and for everyone—even Mercer. He and her parents had been late to get PCs, late to buy a cellphone, late to everything. It was comical and it was sad, and it served no purpose, to put off the undeniable present, the unavoidable future.
So she would wait. In the meantime, she opened the chute. There were few people with pressing needs at that hour, but there were always unanswered queries waiting for business hours to start, so she figured she could chip away at the load before the newbies came in. Maybe she’d finish them all, stun everyone, let them come in with a clean slate, an empty chute.
There were 188 latent queries. She’d do what she could do. A customer in Twin Falls wanted a rundown of all the other businesses visited by customers who had visited his. Mae found the information easily and sent it to him, and instantly she felt calmer. The next two were easy, boilerplate answers. She sent surveys and got 100s on both. One of them sent her a survey in return; she answered it and was done in ninety seconds. The next few queries were more complicated but she kept her rating at 100. The sixth was more complicated still, but she answered it, got a 98, followed up and brought it to a 100. The client, a heating/air-conditioning advertiser from Melbourne, Australia, asked if he could add her to his professional network and she readily agreed. That’s when he realized she was Mae.
THE Mae? he typed. His name was Edward.
Can’t deny it, she answered.
I’m honored, Edward typed. What time is it there? We’re just finishing our workday here. She said it was late. He asked if he could add her to his mailing list, and again she readily agreed. What followed was a quick deluge of news and information about the insurance world of Melbourne. He offered to make her an honorary member of the MHAPB, the Melbourne Heating and Air-Conditioning Providers Guild, formerly the Melbourne Heating and Air-Conditioning Providers Brotherhood, and she said she would be flattered. He added her to the friends on his personal Circle profile, and asked that she reciprocate. She did.
Gotta get back to work now, she wrote, say hello to all in Melbourne! She felt, already, all of the madness of her parents, of Mercer, evaporating like mist. She took the next query, which came from a pet grooming chain based in Atlanta. She got a 99, followed up, got back a 100, and sent six other surveys, five of which the client answered. She took another query, this one from Bangalore, and was in the middle of amending the boilerplate to the query when another message came through from Edward. Did you see my daughter’s request? he asked. Mae checked her screens, looking for some request from Edward’s daughter. Eventually he clarified that his daughter had a different last name, and was in school in New Mexico. She was raising awareness of the plight of bison in the state, and was asking Mae to sign a petition and mention the campaign in whatever forums she could. Mae said she would try, and quickly sent a zing about it. Thank you! Edward wrote, followed, a few minutes later, by a thank-you from his daughter, Helena. I can’t believe Mae Holland signed my petition! Thanks! she wrote. Mae answered three more queries, her rating dipping to 98, and though she sent multiple follow-ups to these three, she got no satisfaction. She knew she’d have to get twenty-two or so 100s to average the 98 up to 100 overall; she checked the clock. It was 12:44. She had plenty of time. Another message came from Helena, asking about jobs at the Circle. Mae offered her usual advice, and sent her the email address of the HR department. Can you put in a good word for me? Helena asked. Mae said she would do as much as she could, given they had never met. But you know me pretty well by now! Helena said, and then directed her to her own profile page. She encouraged Mae to read her essays about wildlife preservation, and the essay she used to get into college, which she said was still relevant. Mae said she would try to read them when she could. Wildlife and New Mexico brought Mercer to mind. That self-righteous waste. Where was that man who made love to her on the edge of the Grand Canyon? They had both been so comfortably lost then, when he picked her up from college and they drove through the Southeast with no schedule, no itineary, never with any idea of where they’d stay that night. They passed through New Mexico in a blizzard and then to Arizona where they parked, and found a cliff overlooking the canyon, with no fences, and there under a noonday sun he undressed her, a four-thousand-foot drop behind her. He held her and she had no doubts because he was strong then. He was young then, he had vision then. Now he was old and acted older. She looked up the profile page she’d set up for him, and found it blank. She made an inquiry to tech and found he’d been trying to take it down. She sent him a zing and got no answer. She looked up his business page but it had been taken down, too; there was only a message saying he was now running an analog-only business. Another message came through from Helena: What did you think? Mae told her she hadn’t had time to read anything yet, and the next message was from Edward, Helena’s father: It sure would mean a lot if you were to recommend Helena for a job there at the Circle. No pressure but we’re counting on you! Mae told them, again, that she’d do her best. A notice came through her second screen about a Circle campaign to eradicate smallpox in West Africa. She signed her name, sent a smile, pledged fifty dollars, and sent a zing about it. She saw immediately that Helena and Edward rezinged the message. We’re doing our part! Edward wrote. Quid pro quo? It was 1:11 when the blackness swept through her. Her mouth tasted acidic. She closed her eyes and saw the tear, now filled with light. She opened her eyes again. She took a swallow of water but it only seemed to heighten her panic. She checked her watchers; there were only 23,010, but she didn’t want to show them her eyes, fearing they would betray her anxiety. She closed them again, which she felt would seem natural enough for a minute, after so many hours in front of the screen. Just resting the eyes, she typed and sent. But when she closed them again, she saw the tear, clearer now, louder now. What was the sound she was hearing? It was a scream muffled by fathomless waters, that high-pitched scream of a million drowned voices. She opened her eyes. She called her parents. No answer. She wrote to them, nothing. She called Annie. No answer. She wrote to her, nothing. She looked her up in the CircleSearch but she wasn’t on campus. She went to Annie’s profile page, scrolled through a few hundred photos, most of them from her Europe-China trip, and, feeling her eyes burn, she closed them again. And again she saw the rip, the light trying to get through, the underwater screams. She opened her eyes. Another message came through from Edward. Mae? You out there? Sure would be nice to know if you can help out. Do write back. Could Mercer really disappear like this? She was determined to find him. She searched for him, for messages he might have sent to others. Nothing. She called him, but his number had been disconnected. Such an aggressive move, to change your number and leave no new one. What had she seen in him? His disgusting fat back, those terrible patches of hair on his shoulders. Jesus, where was he? There was something very wrong when you couldn’t find someone you were trying to find. It was 1:32. Mae? Edward again. Can you reassure Helena that you’ll look at her site sometime soon? She’s a bit upset now. Just any word of encouragement would be helpful. I know you’re a good person and wouldn’t intentionally mess with her head, you know, promising to help and then ignoring her. Cheers! Edward. Mae went to Helena’s site, read one of the essays, congratulated her, told her it was brilliant, and sent out a zing telling everyone that Helena from Melbourne/New Mexico was a voice to be reckoned with, and that they should support her work in any way they could. But the rip was still open inside Mae, and she needed to close it. Not knowing what elese to do, she activated CircleSurveys, and nodded to begin.
“Are you a regular user of conditioner?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Thank you. What do you think about organic hair products?” Already she felt calmer.
“Smile.”
“Thank you. What do you think about nonorganic hair products?”
“Frown,” Mae said. The rhythm felt right.
“Thank you. If your favored haircare product isn’t available at your usual store or online site, would you substitute it for a similar brand?”
“No.”
“Thank you.”
The steady completion of tasks felt right. Mae checked her bracelet, which showed hundreds of new smiles. There was something refreshing, the comments were asserting, about seeing a Circle semi-celebrity like herself contributing to the data pool like this. She was hearing, also, from customers she’d helped in her CE days. Customers from Columbus, Johannesburg and Brisbane all said hello and congratulations. The owner of a marketing firm in Ontario thanked her, via zing, for her good example, for her goodwill, and Mae briefly corresponded, asking how business was up and over there.
She answered three more queries, and was able to get all three customers to fill out extended surveys. The pod rating was 95, which she hoped she could personally help bring up. She was feeling very good, and needed.
“Mae.”
The sound of her name, spoken by her processed voice, was jarring. She felt like she hadn’t heard this voice in months, but it hadn’t lost its power. She knew she should nod, but she wanted to hear it again, so she waited.
“Mae.”
It felt like home.
Mae knew, intellectually, that the only reason she was in Francis’s room was that everyone else in her life had, for the time being, abandoned her. After ninety minutes at CE, she checked the CircleSearch to see where Francis was, and saw he was in one of the dorms. Then she saw he was awake and online. Minutes later he’d invited her over, so grateful and so happy, he said, to be hearing from her. I’m sorry, he wrote, and I’ll say that again when you get to my door. She turned off her camera and went to him.
The door opened.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
“Stop,” Mae said. She stepped in and closed the door.
“You want anything?” he asked. “Water? There’s this new vodka, too, that was here when I got back tonight. We can try it.”
“No thanks,” she said, and sat on a credenza against the wall. Francis had set up his portables there.
“Oh wait. Don’t sit there,” he said.
She stood up. “I didn’t sit on your devices.”
“No, it’s not that,” he said. “It’s the credenza. They told me it’s fragile,” he said, smiling. “Sure you don’t want a drink or anything?”
“No. I’m really tired. I just didn’t want to be alone.”
“Listen,” he said. “I know I should have asked your permission first. I know this. But I hope you can understand where I was coming from. I couldn’t believe I was with you. And there was some part of me that assumed it would be the only time. I wanted to remember it.”
Mae knew the power she had over him, and that power gave her a distinct thrill. She sat on the bed. “So did you find them?” she asked.
“How do you mean?”
“Last I saw you, you were planning to scan those photos, the ones from your album.”
“Oh yeah. I guess I haven’t talked to you since then. I did scan them. The whole thing was easy.”
“So you found who they were?”
“Most of them had Circle accounts so I could just face-rec them. I mean, it took about seven minutes. There were a few I had to use the feds’ database for. We don’t have total access yet, but we can see DMV photos. That’s most of the adults in the country.”
“And did you contact them?”
“Not yet.”
“But you know where they’re all from?”
“Yeah, yeah. Once I knew their names, I could find all their addresses. Some had moved a few times, but I could cross-reference with the years I might have been with them. I actually did this whole timeline of when I might have been at each place. Most of them were in Kentucky. A few in Missouri. One was in Tennessee.”
“So that’s it?”
“Well, I don’t know. A couple are dead, so…I don’t know. I might just drive by some of these houses. Just to fill in some gaps. I don’t know. Oh,” he said, turning over, brightening, “I did have a couple revelations. I mean, most of the stuff was standard memories of these people. But there was one family who had an older girl, she was about fifteen when I was twelve. I didn’t remember much, but I know she was my first serious sexual fantasy.”
Those words, sexual fantasy, had an immediate effect on Mae. In the past, whenever they’d been uttered, with or by any man, it led to the discussion of fantasies, and some degree of enacting one or another fantasy. Which she and Francis did, even if briefly. His fantasy was to leave the room and knock on the door, pretending to be a lost teenager knocking on the door of a beautiful suburban house. Her job was to be a lonely housewife and invite him in, scantily clad and desperate for company.
And so he knocked, and she greeted him at the door, and he told her he was lost, and she told him he should get out of those old clothes, that he could put on some of her husband’s. Francis liked that so much that things accelerated quickly, and in seconds he was undressed and she was on top of him. He lay beneath her for a minute or two, letting Mae rise and fall, looking up at her with the wonderment of a boy at the zoo. Then his eyes closed, and he went into paroxysms, emitting a brief squeal before grunting his arrival.
Now, as Francis brushed his teeth, Mae, exhausted and feeling not love but something close to contentment, arranged herself under the thick comforter and faced the wall. The clock said 3:11.
Francis emerged from the bathroom.
“I have a second fantasy,” he said, pulling the blanket over him and bringing his face close to Mae’s neck.
“I’m inches from sleep,” she muttered.
“No, nothing strenuous. No activity required. This is just a verbal thing.”
“Okay.”
“I want you to rate me,” he said.
“What?”
“Just a rating. Like you do at CE.”
“Like from 1 to 100?”
“Exactly.”
“Rate what? Your performance?”
“Yes.”
“C’mon. I don’t want to do that.”
“It’s just for fun.”
“Francis. Please. I don’t want to. It takes the enjoyment out of it for me.”
Francis sat up with a loud sigh. “Well, not knowing takes the enjoyment out of it for me.”
“Not knowing what?”
“How I did.”
“How you did? You did fine.”
Francis made a loud sound of disgust.
She turned over. “What’s the matter?”
“Fine?” he said. “I’m fine?”
“Oh god. You’re great. You’re perfect. When I say fine, I just mean that you couldn’t do better.”
“Okay,” he said, moving closer to her. “Then why didn’t you say that before?”
“I thought I did.”
“You think ‘fine’ is the same as ‘perfect’ and ‘couldn’t do better’?”
“No. I know it’s not. I’m just tired. I should have been more precise.”
A self-satisfied smile overtook Francis’s face. “You know you just proved my point.”
“What point?”
“We just argued about all this, about the words you used and what they meant. We didn’t understand their meaning the same way, and we went around and around about it. But if you had just used a number I would have understood right away.” He kissed her shoulder.
“Okay. I get it,” she said, and closed her eyes.
“Well?” he said.
She opened her eyes to Francis’s pleading mouth.
“Well what?”
“You’re still not going to give me a number?”
“You really want a number?”
“Mae! Of course I do.”
“Okay, a hundred.”
She turned to the wall again.
“That’s the number?”
“It is. You get a perfect 100.”
Mae felt like she could hear him grinning.
“Thank you,” he said, and kissed the back of her head. “Night.”
The room was grand, on the top floor of the Victorian Era, with its epic views, its glass ceiling. Mae entered and was greeted by most of the Gang of 40, the group of innovators who routinely assessed and greenlighted new Circle ventures.
“Hello Mae!” said a voice, and she found its source, Eamon Bailey, arriving and taking his place at the other end of the long room. Wearing a zippered sweatshirt, his sleeves rolled above his elbows, he entered theatrically and waved to her and, she knew, to all those who might be watching. She expected the audience to be large, given she and the Circle had been zinging about it for days. She checked her bracelet and the current viewership was 1,982,992. Incredible, she thought, and it would climb. She sat in the middle of the table, better to grant the viewers access not just to Bailey but to most of the Gang, their comments and reactions.
After she’d sat, and after it was too late to move, Mae realized she didn’t know where Annie was. She scanned the forty faces in front of her, on the table’s opposite side, and didn’t see her. She craned her neck around, careful to keep the camera trained on Bailey, and finally caught sight of Annie, by the door, behind two rows of Circlers, those standing by the door, in case they needed to leave unnoticed. Mae knew Annie had seen her, but she made no acknowledgement.
“Okay,” Bailey said, smiling broadly at the room, “I think we should just dig in, given we’re all present”—and here his eyes stopped, ever so briefly, on Mae and the camera around her neck. It was important, Mae had been told, that the entire event seem natural, and that it appear that Mae, and the audience, were being invited into a very regular sort of event.
“Hi gang,” Bailey said. “Pun intended.” The forty men and women smiled. “Okay. A few months ago we all met Olivia Santos, a very courageous and visionary legislator who is bringing transparency to a new—and I daresay ultimate—level. And you might have seen that as of today, over twenty thousand other leaders and legislators around the world have followed her lead and have taken the pledge to make their lives as public servants completely transparent. We’ve been very encouraged by this.”
Mae checked the view on her wrist. Her camera was trained on Bailey and the screen behind him. Comments were already coming in, thanking her and the Circle for this kind of access. One watcher compared it to watching the Manhattan Project. Another mentioned Edison’s Menlo Park lab, circa 1879.
Bailey continued: “Now this new era of transparency dovetails with some other ideas I have about democracy, and the role that technology can play in making it complete. And I use the word complete on purpose, because our work toward transparency might actually achieve a fully accountable government. As you’ve seen, the governor of Arizona has had her entire staff go transparent, which is the next step. In a few cases, even with a clear elected official, we’ve seen some corruption behind the scenes. The transparent elected have been used as figureheads, shielding the backroom from view. But that will change soon, I believe. The officials, and their entire offices with nothing to hide, will go transparent within the year, at least in this country, and Tom and I have seen to it that they get a steep discount on the necessary hardware and server capacity to make it happen.”
“But that’s only half the battle. That’s the elected half of things. But what about the other half—our half as citizens? The half where we’re all supposed to participate?”
Behind Bailey, a picture of an empty polling place appeared, in a desolate high school gym somewhere. It dissolved into an array of numbers.
“Here are the numbers of participants in the last elections. As you can see, at the national level, we’re at around 58 percent of those eligible to vote. Incredible, isn’t it? And then you go down the line, to state and local elections, and the percentages drop off a cliff: 32 percent for state elections, 22 percent for counties, 17 percent for most small-town elections. How illogical is that, that the closer government is to home, the less we care about it? It’s absurd, don’t you think?”
Mae checked her watchers; there were over two million. She was adding about a thousand viewers a second.
“Okay,” Bailey continued, “so we know there are a bunch of ways that technology, much of it originating here, has helped make it easier to vote. We’re building on a history of trying to increase access and ease. Back in my day there was the motor voter bill. That helped. Then some states allowed you to register or update your registration online. Fine. But how did it impact voter turnout? Not enough. But here’s where it gets interesting. Here’s how many people voted in the last national election.”
The screen behind him read “140 million.”
“Here’s how many were eligible to vote.”
The screen read “244 million.”
“Meanwhile, there’s us. Here’s how many Americans are registered with the Circle.”
The screen read “241 million.”
“That’s some startling math, right? A hundred million more people are registered with us than voted for the president. What does that tell you?”
“We’re awesome!” an older man, with a gray ponytail and a frayed T-shirt, yelled from the second row. Laughter opened up the room.
“Well sure,” Bailey said, “but besides that? It tells you that the Circle has a knack for getting people to participate. And there are a lot of people in Washington who agree. There are people in DC who see us as the solution to making this a fully participatory democracy.”
Behind Bailey, the familiar image of Uncle Sam pointing appeared. Then another image, of Bailey wearing the same outfit, in the same pose, appeared next to Uncle Sam. The room guffawed.
“So now we get to the meat of today’s session, and that is: What if your Circle profile automatically registered you to vote?”
Bailey swept his eyes across the room, hesitating again at Mae and her watchers. She checked her wrist. Goosebumps, one viewer wrote.
“With TruYou, to set up a profile, you have to be a real person, with a real address, complete personal info, a real Social Security number, a real and verifiable date of birth. In other words, all the information the government traditionally wants when you register to vote. In fact, as you all know, we have far more information. So why wouldn’t this be enough information to allow you to register? Or better yet, why wouldn’t the government—our government or any government—just consider you registered once you set up a TruYou profile?”
The forty heads in the room nodded, some out of acknowledgement of a sensible idea, some clearly having thought of this before, that it was a notion long discussed.
Mae checked her bracelet. The viewer numbers were climbing quicker, ten thousand a second, and were now over 2,400,000. She had 1,248 messages. Most had come through in the last ninety seconds. Bailey glanced down at his own tablet, no doubt seeing the same numbers she was seeing. Smiling, he continued: “There’s no reason. And a lot of legislators agree with me. Congresswoman Santos does, for one. And I have verbal commitments from 181 other members of Congress and 32 senators. They’ve all agreed to push legislation to make your TruYou profile your automatic path to registration. Not bad, right?”
There was a brief round of applause.
“Now think,” Bailey said, his voice a whisper of hope and wonder, “think if we can get closer to full participation in all elections. There would be no more grumbling from the sidelines from people who had neglected to participate. There would be no more candidates who had been elected by a fringe, wedge group. As we know here at the Circle, with full participation comes full knowledge. We know what Circlers want because we ask, and because they know their answers are necessary to get a full and accurate picture of the desires of the whole Circle community. So if we observe the same model nationally, electorally, then we can get very close, I think, to 100 percent participation. One hundred percent democracy.”
Applause rippled through the room. Bailey smiled broadly, and Stenton stood; it was, for him at least, apparently the end of the presentation. But an idea had been forming within Mae’s mind, and she raised her hand, tentatively.
“Yes Mae,” Bailey said, his face still locked into a broad grin of triumph.
“Well, I wonder if we couldn’t take this one step further. I mean…Well, actually, I don’t think it—”
“No, no. Go on, Mae. You started well. I like the words one step further. That’s how this company was built.”
Mae looked around the room, the faces a mix of encouraging and concerned. Then she alighted on Annie’s face, and because it was stern, and dissatisfied, and seemed to be expecting, or wanting, Mae to fail, to embarrass herself, Mae gathered herself, took a breath, and forged ahead.
“Okay, well, you were saying we could get close to 100 percent participation. And I wonder why we couldn’t just work backwards from that goal, using all the steps you outlined. All the tools we already have.”
Mae looked around the room, ready to quit at the first pair of skeptical eyes, but she saw only curiosity, the slow collective nodding of a group practiced in pre-emptive validation.
“Go on,” Bailey said.
“I’m just going to connect some dots,” Mae said. “Well, first of all, we all agree that we’d like 100 percent participation, and that everyone would agree that 100 percent participation is the ideal.”
“Yes,” Bailey said. “It’s certainly the idealist’s ideal.”
“And we currently have 83 percent of the voting-age Americans registered on the Circle?”
“And it seems that we’re on our way to voters being able to register, and maybe even to actually vote, through the Circle.”
Bailey’s head was bobbing side to side, some indication of mild doubt, but he was smiling, his eyes encouraging. “A small leap, but okay. Go on.”
“So why not require every voting-age citizen to have a Circle account?”
There was some shuffling in the room, some intake of breath, mostly from the older Circlers.
“Let her finish,” someone, a new voice, said. Mae looked around to find Stenton near the door. His armed were crossed, his eyes staring at the floor. He looked, briefly, up to Mae, and nodded brusquely. She regained her direction.
“Okay, I know the initial reaction will be resistance. I mean, how can we require anyone to use our services? But we have to remember that there are all kinds of things that are mandatory for citizens of this country—and these things are mandatory in most industrialized countries. Do you have to send your kids to school? Yes. That’s mandatory. It’s a law. Kids have to go to school, or you have to arrange some kind of home schooling. But it’s mandatory. It’s also mandatory that you register for the draft, right? That you get rid of your garbage in an acceptable way; you can’t drop it on the street. You have to have a license if you want to drive, and when you do, you have to wear a seat belt.”
Stenton joined in again. “We require people to pay taxes. And to pay into Social Security. To serve on juries.”
“Right,” Mae said, “and to pee indoors, not on the streets. I mean, we have ten thousand laws. We require so many legitimate things of citizens of the United States. So why can’t we require them to vote? They do in dozens of countries.”
“It’s been proposed here,” one of the older Circlers said.
“Not by us,” Stenton countered.
“And that’s my point,” Mae said, nodding to Stenton. “The technology has never been there before. I mean, at any other moment in history, it would have been prohibitively expensive to track down everyone and register them to vote, and then to make sure they actually did. You’d have to go door to door. Drive people to polls. All these unfeasible things. Even in the countries where it’s mandatory, it’s not really enforced. But now it’s within reach. I mean, you cross-reference any voting rolls with the names in our TruYou database, and you’d find half the missing voters right there and then. You register them automatically, and then when election day comes around, you make sure they vote.”
“How do we do that?” a female voice said. Mae realized it was Annie’s. It wasn’t a direct challenge, but the tone wasn’t friendly, either.
“Oh jeez,” Bailey said, “a hundred ways. That’s an easy part. You remind them ten times that day. Maybe their accounts don’t work that day till they vote. That’s what I’d favor anyway. ‘Hello Annie!’ it could say. ‘Take five minutes to vote.’ Whatever it is. We do that for our own surveys. You know that, Annie.” And when he said her name, he shaded it with disappointment and warning, discouraging her from opening her mouth again. He brightened and turned back to Mae. “And the stragglers?” he asked.
Mae smiled at him. She had an answer. She looked at her bracelet. There were now 7,202,821 people watching. When had that happened?
“Well, everyone has to pay taxes, right? How many people do it online now? Last year, maybe 80 percent. What if we all stopped duplicating services and made it all part of one unified system? You use your Circle account to pay taxes, to register to vote, to pay your parking tickets, to do anything. I mean, we would save each user hundreds of hours of inconvenience, and collectively, the country would save billions.”
“Hundreds of billions,” Stenton amended.
“Right,” Mae said. “Our interfaces are infinitely easier to use than, say, the patchwork of DMV sites around the country. What if you could renew your license through us? What if every government service could be facilitated through our network? People would leap at the chance. Instead of visiting a hundred different sites for a hundred different government services, it could all be done through the Circle.”
Annie opened her mouth again. Mae knew it was a mistake. “But why wouldn’t the government,” Annie asked, “just build a similar wraparound service? Why do they need us?”
Mae couldn’t decide if she was asking this rhetorically or if she truly felt this was a valid point. In any case, much of the room was now snickering. The government building a system, from scratch, to rival the Circle? Mae looked to Bailey and to Stenton. Stenton smiled, raised his chin, and decided to take this one himself.
“Well, Annie, a government project to build a similar platform from the ground up would be ludicrous, and costly, and, well, impossible. We already have the infrastructure, and 83 percent of the electorate. Does that make sense to you?”
Annie nodded, her eyes showing fear and regret and maybe even some quickly fading defiance. Stenton’s tone was dismissive, and Mae hoped he would soften when he continued.
“Now more than ever,” he said, but now more condescending than before, “Washington is trying to save money, and is disinclined to build vast new bureaucracies from scratch. Right now it costs the government about ten dollars to facilitate every vote. Two hundred million people vote, and it costs the feds two billion to run the presidential election every four years. Just to process the votes for that one election, that one day. You factor in every state and local election, we’re talking hundreds of billions every year in unnecessary costs associated with simple vote processing. I mean, they’re still doing it on paper in some states. If we provide these services for free, we’re saving the government billions of dollars, and, more importantly, the results would be known simultaneously. Do you see the truth in that?”
Annie nodded grimly, and Stenton looked to her, as if assessing her anew. He turned to Mae, urging her to continue.
“And if it’s mandatory to have a TruYou account to pay taxes or receive any government service,” she said, “then we’re very close to having 100 percent of the citizenry. And then we can take the temperature of everyone at any time. A small town wants everyone to vote on a local ordinance. TruYou knows everyone’s address, so only residents of that town can vote. And when they do, the results are known in minutes. A state wants to see how everyone feels about a new tax. Same thing—instant and clear and verifiable data.”
“It would eliminate the guesswork,” Stenton said, now standing at the head of the table. “Eliminate lobbyists. Eliminate polls. It might even eliminate Congress. If we can know the will of the people at any time, without filter, without misinterpretation or bastardization, wouldn’t it eliminate much of Washington?”
The night was cold and the winds were lacerating but Mae didn’t notice. Everything felt good, clean and right. To have the validation of the Wise Men, to have perhaps pivoted the entire company in a new direction, to have, perhaps, perhaps, ensured a new level of participatory democracy—could it be that the Circle, with her new idea, might really perfect democracy? Could she have conceived of the solution to a thousand-year-old problem?
There had been some concern, just after the meeting, about a private company taking over a very public act like voting. But the logic of it, the savings inherent, was winning the day. What if the schools had two hundred billion? What if the health care system had two hundred billion? Any number of the country’s ills would be addressed or solved with that kind of savings—savings not just every four years, but some semblance of them every year. To eliminate all costly elections, replaced by instantaneous ones, all of them nearly cost-free?
This was the promise of the Circle. This was the unique position of the Circle. This is what people were zinging. She read the zings as she rode with Francis, in a train under the bay, the two of them grinning, out of their minds. They were being recognized. People were stepping in front of Mae to get onto her video feed, and she didn’t care, hardly noticed, because the news coming through her right bracelet was too good to take her eyes off.
She checked her left arm, briefly; her pulse was elevated, her heart rate at 130. But she was loving it. When they arrived downtown, they took the stairs three at a time and arrived above ground, suddenly lit in gold, on Market Street, the Bay Bridge blinking beyond.
“Holy sh*t, it’s Mae!” Who had said that? Mae found, hurrying toward them, a teenaged pair, hoodies and headphones. “Rock on, Mae,” the other one said, their eyes approving, starstruck, before the two of them, clearly not wanting to seem stalky, hurried down the stairs.
“That was fun,” Francis said, watching them descend.
Mae walked toward the water. She thought of Mercer and saw him as a shadow, quickly disappearing. She hadn’t heard from him, or Annie, since the talk, and she didn’t care. Her parents hadn’t said a word, and might not have seen her performance, and she found herself unconcerned. She cared only about this moment, this night, the sky clear and starless.
“I can’t believe how poised you were,” Francis said, and he kissed her—a dry, professional kiss on the lips.
“Was I okay?” she asked, knowing how ridiculous it sounded, this kind of doubt in the wake of such an obvious success, but wanting once more to hear that she had done a good job.
“You were perfect,” he said. “A 100.”
Quickly, as they walked toward the water, she scrolled through the most popular recent comments. There seemed to be one particular zing with heat, something about how all this could or would lead to totalitarianism. Her stomach sank.
“C’mon. You can’t listen to a lunatic like that,” Francis said. “What does she know? Some crank somewhere with a tin-foil hat.” Mae smiled, not knowing what the tin-foil hat reference meant, but knowing she’d heard her father say it, and it made her smile to think of him saying it.
“Let’s get a libation,” Francis said, and they decided on a glittering brewery on the water fronted by a wide outdoor patio. Even as they approached, Mae saw recognition in the eyes of the array of pretty young people drinking outdoors.
“It’s Mae!” one said.
A young man, seeming too young to be drinking at all, aimed his face at Mae’s camera. “Hey mom, I’m home studying.” A woman of about thirty, who may or may not have been with the too young man, said, walking out of view, “Hey honey, I’m at a book club with the ladies. Say hi to the kids!”
The night was dizzy and bright and went too fast. Mae barely moved at the bayside bar—she was surrounded, she was handed drinks, she was patted on the back, she was tapped on the shoulder. All night she pivoted, turning a few degrees, like a haywire clock, to greet each new well-wisher. Everyone wanted a picture with her, wanted to ask her when all this would happen. When would we break through all these unnecessary barriers? they asked. Now that the solution seemed clear and easy enough to execute, no one wanted to wait. A woman a bit older than Mae, slurring and holding a Manhattan, expressed it best, though unwittingly: How, she asked, spilling her drink but with eyes sharp, How do we get the inevitable sooner?
Mae and Francis found themselves at a quieter place down the Embarcadero, where they ordered another round and found themselves joined by a man in his fifties. Uninvited, he sat down with them, holding a large drink in both hands. In seconds he’d told them he was once a divinity student, was living in Ohio and heading for the priesthood, when he discovered computers. He’d dropped it all and moved to Palo Alto, but had felt removed, for twenty years, he said, from the spiritual. Until now.
“I saw your talk today,” he said. “You connected it all. You found a way to save all the souls. This is what we were doing in the church—we tried to get them all. How to save them all? This has been the work of missionaries for millennia.” He was slurring, but took another long swallow from his drink. “You and yours at the Circle”—and here he drew a circle in the air, horizontally, and Mae thought of a halo—“you’re gonna save all the souls. You’re gonna get everyone in one place, you’re gonna teach them all the same things. There can be one morality, one set of rules. Imagine!” And here he slammed his open palm upon the iron table, rattling his glass. “Now all humans will have the eyes of God. You know this passage? ‘All things are naked and opened unto the eyes of God.’ Something like that. You know your Bible?” Seeing the blank looks on the faces of Mae and Francis, he scoffed and took a long pull from his drink. “Now we’re all God. Every one of us will soon be able to see, and cast judgment upon, every other. We’ll see what He sees. We’ll articulate His judgment. We’ll channel His wrath and deliver His forgiveness. On a constant and global level. All religion has been waiting for this, when every human is a direct and immediate messenger of God’s will. Do you see what I’m saying?” Mae looked at Francis, who was having little success holding back a laugh. He burst first, and she followed, and they cackled, trying to apologize to him, holding their hands up, begging his forgiveness. But he was having none of it. He stepped away from the table, then swirled back to get his drink, and, now complete, he rambled crookedly down the waterfront.
Mae awoke next to Francis. It was seven a.m. They’d passed out in her dorm room shortly after two. She checked her phone, finding 322 new messages. As she was holding it, her eyes bleary, it rang. The caller ID was blocked, and she knew it could only be Kalden. She let it go to voicemail. He called a dozen more times throughout the morning. He called while Francis got up, kissed her, and returned to his own room. He called while she was in the shower, while she was dressing. She brushed her hair, adjusted her bracelets, and lifted the lens over her head, and he called again. She ignored the call and opened her messages.
There was an array of congratulatory threads, from inside and outside the Circle, the most intriguing of which was spurred by Bailey himself, who alerted Mae that Circle developers had begun to act on her ideas already. They’d been working through the night, in a fever of inspiration, and within a week hoped to prototype a version of Mae’s notions, to be used first in the Circle, polished there and later rolled out for use in any nation where Circle membership was strong enough to make it practical.
We’re calling it Demoxie, Bailey zinged. It’s democracy with your voice, and your moxie. And it’s coming soon.
That morning Mae was invited to the developers’ pod, where she found twenty or so exhausted but inspired engineers and designers, who apparently already had a beta version of Demoxie ready. When Mae entered, cheers erupted, the lights dimmed, and a single light shone on a woman with long black hair and a face of barely contained joy.
“Hello Mae, hello Mae’s watchers,” she said, bowing briefly. “My name is Sharma, and I’m so glad, and so honored, to be with you today. Today we’ll be demonstrating the very earliest form of Demoxie. Normally we wouldn’t move so quickly, and so, well, transparently, but given the Circle’s fervent belief in Demoxie, and our confidence that it will be adopted quickly and globally, we couldn’t see any reason to delay.”
The wallscreen came to life. The word Demoxie appeared, rendered in a spirited font and set inside a blue-and-white striped flag.
“The goal is to make sure that everyone who works at the Circle can weigh in on issues that affect their lives—mostly on campus, but in the larger world, too. So throughout any given day, when the Circle needs to take the company’s temperature on any given issue, Circlers will get a pop-up notice, and they’ll be asked to answer the question or questions. The expected turnaround will be speedy, and will be essential. And because we care so much about everyone’s input, your other messaging systems will freeze temporarily until you answer. Let me show you.”
On the screen, below the Demoxie logo, the question Should we have more veggie options at lunch? was bookended by buttons on either side, Yes and No.
Mae nodded. “Very impressive, guys!”
“Thank you,” Sharma said. “Now, if you’ll indulge us. You have to answer, too.” And she invited Mae to touch either Yes or No on the screen.
“Oh,” Mae said. She walked up to the screen and pushed Yes. The engineers cheered, the developers cheered. On the screen, a happy face appeared, with the words You are heard! arcing above. The question disappeared, replaced by the words Demoxie result: 75% of respondents want more veggie options. More veggie options will be provided.
Sharma was beaming. “See? That’s a simulated result, of course. We don’t have everyone on Demoxie yet, but you get the gist. The question appears, everyone stops briefly what they’re doing, responds, and instantly, the Circle can take appropriate action knowing the full and complete will of the people. Incredible, right?”
“It is,” Mae said.
“Imagine this rolled out nationwide. Worldwide!”
“It’s beyond my capability to imagine.”
“But you came up with this!” Sharma said.
Mae didn’t know what to say. Had she invented this? She wasn’t sure. She’d connected a few dots: the efficiency and utility of the CircleSurveys, the constant Circle goal of total saturation, the universal hope for real and unfiltered—and, most crucially, complete—democracy. Now it was in the hands of the developers, hundreds of them at the Circle, the best in the world. Mae told them this, that she was just one person who connected a few ideas that stood inches apart, and Sharma, and her team, beamed, and shook her hand, and they all agreed that what had already been done was setting the Circle, and possibly all of humanity, on a significant new path.
Mae left the Renaissance and was greeted, just outside the door, by a group of young Circlers, all of whom wanted to tell her—all of them on their tiptoes, bursting—that they had never voted before, that they had been utterly uninterested in politics, had felt disconnected entirely from their government, feeling they had no real voice. They told her that by the time their vote, or their name on some petition, was filtered through their local government, and then their state officials, and finally their representatives in Washington, it felt like sending a message in a bottle across a vast and troubled sea. But now, the young Circlers said, they felt involved. If Demoxie worked, they said, then laughed—when Demoxie is implemented, of course it will work, they said—and when it does, you’ll finally have a fully engaged populace, and when you do, the country and the world will hear from the youth, and their inherent idealism and progressivism will upend the planet. This is what Mae heard all day, as she wandered through the campus. She could barely get from one building to another without being accosted. We’re on the verge of actual change, they said. Change at the speed that our hearts demand.
But throughout the morning, the calls from the blocked number continued. She knew it was Kalden, and she knew she wanted no part of him. Talking to him, much less seeing him, would be a significant step back now. By noon, Sharma and her team announced that they were ready for the first actual all-campus Demoxie tryout. At 12:45 everyone would receive five questions, and the results would not only be tabulated immediately, but, the Wise Men promised, the will of the people would be enacted within the day.
Mae was standing in the center of the campus, amid a few hundred Circlers eating lunch, all of them buzzing about the imminent Demoxie demonstration, and she thought of that painting of the Constitutional Convention, all those men in powdered wigs and waistcoats, standing stiffly, all of them wealthy white men who were only passably interested in representing their fellow humans. They were purveyors of an innately flawed kind of democracy, where only the wealthy were elected, where their voices were heard loudest, where they passed their seats in Congress to whatever similarly entitled person they deemed appropriate. There had been some incremental improvements in the system since then, maybe, but Demoxie would explode it all. Demoxie was purer, was the only chance at direct democracy the world had ever known.
It was twelve thirty, and because Mae was feeling strong, and feeling so confident, she finally succumbed and answered her phone, knowing it would be Kalden.
“Hello?” she said.
“Mae,” he said, his voice terse, “this is Kalden. Don’t say my name. I’ve rigged it so the incoming audio isn’t working.”
“No.”
“Mae. Please. This is life or death.”
Kalden held a power over her that shamed her. It made her feel weak and pliable. In every other facet of her life she was in control, but his voice alone disassembled her, and opened her to an array of bad decisions. A minute later she was in the stall, her audio was off, and her phone rang again.
“I’m sure someone is tracing this,” she said.
“No one is. I bought us time.”
“Kalden, what do you want?”
“You can’t do this. Your mandatory thing, and the positive reaction it’s gotten—this is the last step toward closing the Circle, and that can’t happen.”
“What are you talking about? This is the whole point. If you’ve been here so long, you know more than anyone that that’s been the goal of the Circle since the beginning. I mean, it’s a circle, stupid. It has to close. It has to be complete.”
“Mae, all along, for me at least, this kind of thing was the fear, not the goal. Once it’s mandatory to have an account, and once all government services are channeled through the Circle, you’ll have helped create the world’s first tyrannical monopoly. Does it seem like a good idea to you that a private company would control the flow of all information? That participation, at their beck and call, is mandatory?”
“You know what Ty said, right?”
Mae heard a loud sigh. “Maybe. What did he say?”
“He said the soul of the Circle is democratic. That until everyone has equal access, and that access is free, no one is free. It’s on at least a few tiles around campus.”
“Mae. Fine. The Circle’s good. And whoever invented TruYou is some kind of evil genius. But now it has to be reined in. Or broken up.”
“Why do you care? If you don’t like it, why don’t you leave? I know you’re some spy for some other company. Or Williamson. Some loony anarchist politician.”
“Mae, this is it. You know this affects everyone. When were you last able to meaningfully contact your parents? Obviously things are messed up, and you’re in a unique position to influence very crucial historical events here. This is it. This is the moment where history pivots. Imagine if you could have been there before Hitler became chancellor. Before Stalin annexed Eastern Europe. We’re on the verge of having another very hungry, very evil empire on our hands, Mae. Do you understand?”
“Do you know how crazy you sound?”
“Mae, I know you’re doing that big plankton meeting in a couple days. The one where the kids pitch their ideas, hoping the Circle buys them and devours them.”
“So?”
“The audience will be big. We need to reach the young, and the plankton pitching is when your watchers will be young and vast. It’s perfect. The Wise Men will be there. I need you to take that opportunity to warn everyone. I need you to say, ‘Let’s think about what closing the Circle means.’”
“You mean completing?”
“Same thing. What it means for personal liberties, for the freedom to move, do whatever one wants to do, to be free.”
“You’re a lunatic. I can’t believe I—” Mae meant to finish that sentence with “slept with you” but now, even the thought of it seemed sick.
“Mae, no entity should have the power those guys have.”
“I’m hanging up.”
“Mae. Think about it. They’ll write songs about you.”
She hung up.
By the time she made it to the Great Hall, it was raucous with a few thousand Circlers. The rest of the campus had been asked to stay at their workspaces, to demonstrate to the world how Demoxie would work across the whole company, with Circlers voting from their desks, from their tablets and phones and even retinally. On the screen in the Great Room, a vast grid of SeeChange cameras showed Circlers at the ready in every corner of every building. Sharma had explained, in one of a series of zings, that once the Demoxie questions were sent, each Circler’s ability to do anything else—any zing, any keystroke—would be suspended until they voted. Democracy is mandatory here! she said, and added, much to Mae’s delight, Sharing is caring. Mae planned to vote on her wrist, and had promised her watchers that she would take into account their input, too, if they were quick enough. The voting, Sharma suggested, shouldn’t take longer than sixty seconds.
And then the Demoxie logo appeared on the screen, and the first question arrived below it.
1. Should the Circle offer more veggie options at lunch?
The crowd in the Great Hall laughed. Sharma’s team had chosen to start with the question they’d been testing. Mae checked her wrist, seeing that a few hundred watchers had sent smiles, and so she chose that option and pushed “send.” She looked up to the screen, watching Circlers vote, and within eleven seconds the whole campus had done so, and the results were tabulated. Eighty-eight percent of the campus wanted more veggie options at lunch.
A zing came through from Bailey: It shall be done.
The Great Hall shook with applause.
The next question appeared: 2. Should Take Your Daughter to Work Day happen twice a year, instead of just once?
The answer was known within 12 seconds. Forty-five percent said yes. Bailey zinged: Looks like once is enough for now.
The demonstration so far was a clear success, and Mae was basking in the congratulations of Circlers in the room, and on her wrist, and from watchers worldwide. The third question appeared, and the room broke up with laughter.
3. John or Paul or…Ringo?
The answer, which took 16 seconds, provoked a riot of surprised cheers: Ringo had won, with 64 percent of the vote. John and Paul were nearly tied, at 20 and 16.
The fourth question was preceded by a sober instruction: Imagine the White House wanted the unfiltered opinion of its constituents. And imagine you had the direct and immediate ability to influence U.S. foreign policy. Take your time on this one. There might come a day—there should come a day—when all Americans are heard in such matters.
The instructions disappeared, and the question arrived:
4. Intelligence agencies have located terrorist mastermind Mohammed Khalil al-Hamed in a lightly populated area of rural Pakistan. Should we send a drone to kill him, considering the likelihood of moderate collateral damage?
Mae caught her breath. She knew this was a demonstration only, but the power felt real. And it felt right. Why wouldn’t the wisdom of three hundred million Americans be taken into account when making a decision that affected them all? Mae paused, thinking, weighing the pros and cons. The Circlers in the room seemed to be taking the responsibility as seriously as Mae. How many lives would be saved by killing al-Hamed? It could be thousands, and the world would be rid of an evil man. The risk seemed worth it. She voted yes. The full tally arrived after one minute, eleven seconds: 71 percent of Circlers favored a drone strike. A hush fell over the room.
Then the last question appeared:
5. Is Mae Holland awesome or what?
Mae laughed, and the room laughed, and Mae blushed, thinking this was all a bit much. She decided she couldn’t vote on this one, given how absurd it would be to cast a vote either way, and she simply watched her wrist, which, she soon realized, had been frozen. Soon the question on her wristscreen was blinking urgently. All Circlers must vote, the screen said, and she remembered that the survey couldn’t be complete until every Circler had registered their opinion. Because she felt silly calling herself awesome, she pushed “frown,” guessing it would be the only one, and would get a laugh.
But when the votes were tallied, seconds later, she was not the only one to have sent a frown. The vote was 97 percent to 3, smiles to frowns, indicating that overwhelmingly, her fellow Circlers found her awesome. When the numbers appeared, the Great Room erupted in whoops, and she was patted on the back as everyone filed out, feeling the experiment a monumental success. And Mae felt this way, too. She knew Demoxie was working, and its potential unlimited. And she knew she should feel good about 97 percent of the campus finding her awesome. But as she left the hall, and made her way across campus, she could only think of the 3 percent who did not find her awesome. She did the math. If there were now 12,318 Circlers—they’d just subsumed a Philadelphia startup specializing in the gamification of affordable housing—and every one of them had voted, that meant that 369 people had frowned at her, thought she was something other than awesome. No, 368. She’d frowned at herself, assuming she’d be the only one.
She felt numb. She felt naked. She walked through the health club, glancing at the bodies sweating, stepping on and off machines, and she wondered who among them had frowned at her. Three hundred and sixty-eight people loathed her. She was devastated. She left the health club and looked for a quiet place to collect her thoughts. She made her way to the rooftop near her old pod, where Dan had first told her of the Circle’s commitment to community. It was a half-mile walk from where she was, and she wasn’t sure she could make it. She was being stabbed. She had been stabbed. Who were these people? What had she done to them? They didn’t know her. Or did they? And what kind of community members would send a frown to someone like Mae, who was working tirelessly with them, for them, in full view?
She was trying to hold it together. She smiled when she passed fellow Circlers. She accepted their congratulations and gratitude, each time wondering which of them was two-faced, which of them had pushed that frown button, each push of that button the pull of a trigger. That was it, she realized. She felt full of holes, as if every one of them had shot her, from behind, cowards filling her with holes. She could barely stand.
And then, just before reaching her old building, she saw Annie. They hadn’t had a natural interaction in months, but immediately something in Annie’s face spoke of light and happiness. “Hey!” she said, catapulting herself forward to take Mae in a wraparound hug.
Mae’s eyes were suddenly wet, and she wiped them, feeling silly and elated and confused. All her conflicted thoughts of Annie were, for a moment, washed away.
“You’re doing well?” she asked.
“I am. I am. So many good things happening,” Annie said. “Did you hear about the PastPerfect project?”
Mae sensed something in Annie’s voice then, an indication that Annie was talking, primarily, to the audience around Mae’s neck. Mae went along.
“Well, you told me the gist before. What’s new with PastPerfect, Annie?”
While looking at Annie, and appearing interested in what Annie was saying, Mae’s mind was elsewhere: Had Annie frowned at her? Maybe just to knock her down a notch? And how would Annie fare in a Demoxie poll? Could she beat 97 percent? Could anyone?
“Oh gosh, so many things, Mae. As you know, PastPerfect has been in the works for many years. It’s what you might call a passion project of Eamon Bailey. What if, he thought, we used the power of the web, and of the Circle and its billions of members, to try to fill in the gaps in personal history, and history generally?”
Mae, seeing her friend trying so hard, could do nothing but try to match her glossy enthusiasm.
“Whoa, that sounds incredible. Last we talked, they were looking for a pioneer to be the first to have their ancestry mapped. Did they find that person?”
“Well, they did, Mae, I’m glad you asked. They found that person, and that person is me.”
“Oh, right. So they really didn’t choose yet?”
“No, really,” Annie said, her voice lowering, and suddenly sounding more like the actual Annie. Then she brightened again, rising an octave. “It’s me!”
Mae had become practiced in waiting before speaking—transparency had taught her to measure every word—and now, instead of saying, “I expected it to be some newbie, someone without a whole lot of experience. Or at the very least a striver, someone trying to make some PartiRank leaps, or curry favor with the Wise Men. But you?” She realized that Annie was, or felt she was, in a position where she needed a boost, an edge. And thus she’d volunteered.
“I did. I did,” Annie said, looking at Mae but utterly through her. “The more I heard about it, the more I wanted to be the first. As you know, but your watchers might not, my family came here on the Mayflower”—and here she rolled her eyes—“and though we have some high-water marks in our family history, there’s so much I don’t know.”
Mae was speechless. Annie had gone haywire. “And everyone’s onboard with this? Your parents?”
“They’re so excited. I guess they’ve always been proud of our heritage, and the ability to share it with people, and along the way find out a bit about the history of the country, well, it appealed to them. Speaking of parents, how are yours?”
My god, this was strange, Mae thought. There were so many layers to all this, and while her mind was counting them, mapping them and naming them, her face and mouth had to carry on this conversation.
“They’re fine,” Mae said, even though she knew, and Annie knew, that Mae hadn’t been in touch with them in weeks. They had sent word, through a cousin, of their health, which was fine, but they had left their home, “fleeing” was the only word they used in their brief message, telling Mae not to worry about anything.
Mae wrapped up the conversation with Annie and walked slowly, foggy-headed, back through campus, knowing Annie was satisfied in how she’d communicated her news, and trumped and thoroughly confused Mae, all in one brief encounter. Annie had been appointed the center of PastPerfect and Mae hadn’t been told, and was made to look idiotic. Certainly that would have been Annie’s goal. And why Annie? It didn’t make sense to go to Annie, when it would have been easier to have Mae do it; Mae was already transparent.
Mae realized that Annie had asked for this. Begged the Wise Men for this. Her proximity to them had made it possible. And so Mae was not as close as she’d imagined; Annie still held some particular status. Again Annie’s lineage, her head start, the varied and ancient advantages she enjoyed, were keeping Mae second. Always second, like she was some kind of little sister who never had a chance of succeeding an older, always older sibling. Mae was trying to remain calm, but messages were coming through her wrist that made clear her viewers were seeing her frustration, her distraction.
She needed to breathe. She needed to think. But there was too much in her head. There was Annie’s ludicrous gamesmanship. There was this ridiculous PastPerfect thing, which should have gone to Mae. Was it because Mae’s parents had slipped off the path? And where were her parents, anyway? Why were they sabotaging everything Mae was working for? But what was she working for, anyway, if 368 Circlers didn’t approve of her? Three hundred and sixty-eight people who apparently actively hated her, enough to push a button at her—to send their loathing directly to her, knowing she would know, immediately, their sentiments. And what about this cellular mutation some Scottish scientist was worried about? A cancerous mutation that might be happening inside Mae, provoked by mistakes in her diet? Had that really happened? And sh*t, Mae thought, her throat tightening, did she really send a frown to a group of heavily armed paramilitaries in Guatemala? What if they had contacts here? Certainly there were plenty of Guatemalans in California, and certainly they would be more than happy to have a trophy like Mae, to punish her for her opprobrium. f*ck, she thought. f*ck. There was a pain in her, a pain that was spreading its black wings inside her. And it was coming, primarily, from the 368 people who apparently hated her so much they wanted her gone. It was one thing to send a frown to Central America, but to send one just across campus? Who would do that? Why was there so much animosity in the world? And then it occurred to her, in a brief and blasphemous flash: she didn’t want to know how they felt. The flash opened up into something larger, an even more blasphemous notion that her brain contained too much. That the volume of information, of data, of judgments, of measurements, was too much, and there were too many people, and too many desires of too many people, and too many opinions of too many people, and too much pain from too many people, and having all of it constantly collated, collected, added and aggregated, and presented to her as if that all made it tidier and more manageable—it was too much. But no. No, it was not, her better brain corrected. No. You’re hurt by these 368 people. This was the truth. She was hurt by them, by the 368 votes to kill her. Every one of them preferred her dead. If only she didn’t know about this. If only she could return to life before this 3 percent, when she could walk through campus, waving, smiling, chatting idly, eating, sharing human contact, without knowing what was deep in the hearts of the 3 percent. To frown at her, to stick their fingers at that button, to shoot her that way, it was a kind of murder. Mae’s wrist was flashing with dozens of messages of concern. With help from the campus SeeChange cameras, watchers were noticing her standing, stock-still, her face contorted into some raging, wretched mask.
She needed to do something. She went back to CE, waved to Jared and the rest, and logged herself into the chute.
In minutes she had helped with a query from a small jewelry maker in Prague, had checked out the maker’s website, had found the work intriguing and wonderful and had said so, aloud and in a zing, which produced an astronomical Conversion Rate and a Retail Raw, in ten minutes, of 52,098 euros. She helped a sustainably sourced furniture wholesaler in North Carolina, Design for Life, and after answering their query, they wanted her to fill out a customer survey, which was especially important given her age and income bracket—they needed more information about the preferences of customers in her demographic. She did that, and also commented on a series of photos her contact at Design for Life, Sherilee Fronteau, had sent her of her son at his first T-ball practice. When Mae commented on those photos, she received a message from Sherilee thanking Mae, and insisting that she come to Chapel Hill sometime, to see Tyler in person and eat some genuine barbecue. Mae agreed she would, feeling very good to have this new friend on the opposite coast, and moved on to her second message, from a client, Jerry Ulrich, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, who ran a refrigerated truck company. He wanted Mae to forward a message to everyone on her list about the company’s services, that they were trying very hard to increase their presence in California, and any help would be appreciated. Mae zinged him that she would tell everyone she knew, starting with the 14,611,002 followers she had, and he sent word back that he was thrilled to have been so introduced, and that he welcomed business or comments from all 14,611,002 people—1,556 of whom instantly greeted Jerry and said they, too, would spread the word. Then, as he was enjoying the flood of messages, he asked Mae how his niece, who was graduating from Eastern Michigan University in the spring, might go about getting a job at the Circle; it was her dream to work there, and should she move out west to be closer, or should she hope to get an interview based on her résumé alone? Mae directed him to the HR department, and gave him some hints of her own. She added the niece to her contact list, and made a note to keep track of her progress, if she indeed applied for work there. One customer, Hector Casilla of Orlando, Florida, told Mae about his interest in birding, sent her some of his photos, which Mae praised and added to her own photo cloud. Hector asked her to rate them, for this might get him noticed in the photo-sharing group he was trying to join. She did so, and he was ecstatic. Within minutes, Hector said, someone in his photo-sharing group had been deeply impressed that an actual Circler was aware of his work, so Hector thanked Mae again. He sent her an invitation to a group exhibition he was part of that winter, in Miami Beach, and Mae said if she found herself down that way in January, she would certainly attend, and Hector, perhaps misconstruing the level of her interest, connected her with his cousin, Natalia, who owned a bed and breakfast only forty minutes from Miami, and who could absolutely get Mae a deal if she chose to come out—her friends, too, were welcome. Natalia then sent a message, with the B&B’s rates, which, she noted, were flexible if she wanted to stay during the week. Natalia followed up a moment later with a long message, full of links to articles and images of the Miami area, elucidating the many activities possible in winter—sport fishing, jet-skiing, dancing. Mae worked on, feeling the familiar tear, the growing blackness, but working through it, killing it, until she finally noticed the time: 10:32.
She’d been in CE for over four hours. She walked to the dorms, feeling far better, feeling calm, and found Francis in bed, working on his tablet, pasting his face into his favorite movies. “Check this out,” he said, and showed her a sequence from an action movie where, instead of Bruce Willis, the protagonist now seemed to be Francis Garaventa. The software was near-perfect, Francis said, and could be operated by any child. The Circle had just purchased it from a three-person startup out of Copenhagen.
“I guess you’ll see more new stuff tomorrow,” Francis said, and Mae remembered the meeting with the plankton pitchers. “It’ll be fun. Sometimes the ideas are even good. And speaking of good ideas…” And then Francis pulled her down to him, and kissed her, and pulled her hips into him, and for a moment she thought they were about to have something like a real sexual experience, but just when she was taking off her shirt, she saw Francis clench his eyes and jerk forward, and she knew he was already done. After changing and brushing his teeth, he asked Mae to rate him, and she gave him a 100.
Mae opened her eyes. It was 4:17 a.m. Francis was turned away from her, sleeping soundlessly. She closed her eyes, but could think only of the 368 people who—it seemed self-evident now—would rather she’d never been born. She had to get back into the CE chute. She sat up.
“What’s the matter?” Francis said.
She turned to find him staring at her.
“Nothing. Just this Demoxie vote thing.”
“You can’t worry about that. It’s a few hundred people.”
He reached for Mae’s back, and, attempting to comfort her from the other side of the bed, achieved more of a wiping motion across her waist.
“But who?” Mae said. “Now I have to walk around campus not knowing who wants me dead.”
Francis sat up. “So why don’t you check?”
“Check what?”
“Who frowned at you. Where do you think you are? The eighteenth century? This is the Circle. You can find out who frowned at you.”
“It’s transparent?”
Instantly Mae felt silly even asking.
“You want me to look?” Francis said, and in seconds he was on his tablet, scrolling. “Here’s the list. It’s public—that’s the whole thing with Demoxie.” His eyes narrowed as he read the list. “Oh, that one’s no surprise.”
“What?” Mae said, her heart jumping. “Who?”
“Mr. Portugal.”
“Alistair?”
Mae’s head was on fire.
“f*cker,” Francis said. “Whatever. f*ck him. You want the whole list?” Francis turned the tablet to her, but before she knew what she was doing, she was backing away, her eyes clenched. She stood in the corner of the room, covering her face with her arms.
“Whoa,” Francis said. “It’s not some rabid animal. They’re just names on a list.”
“Stop,” Mae said.
“Most of these people probably didn’t even mean it. And some of these people I know actually like you.”
“Stop. Stop.”
“Okay, okay. You want me to clear the screen?”
Francis complied.
Mae went into the bathroom and closed the door.
“Mae?” Francis was on the other side.
She turned on the shower and took off her clothes.
“Can I come in?”
Under the pounding water, Mae felt calmer. She reached the wall and turned on the light. She smiled, thinking her reaction to the list was foolish. Of course the votes were public. With actual democracy, a purer kind of democracy, people would be unafraid to cast their votes, and, more importantly, unafraid to be held accountable for those votes. It was up to her, now, to know who those who frowned at her were, and to win them over. Maybe not immediately. She needed time before she’d be ready, but she would know—she needed to know, it was her responsibility to know—and once she knew, the work to correct the 368 would be simple and honest. She was nodding, and smiled realizing she was alone in the shower, nodding. But she couldn’t help it. The elegance of it all, the ideological purity of the Circle, of real transparency, gave her peace, a warming feeling of logic and order.
The group was a gorgeous rainbow coalition of youth, dreadlocks and freckles, eyes of blue and green and brown. They were all sitting forward, their faces alight. Each had four minutes to present his or her idea to the Circle braintrust, including Bailey and Stenton, who were in the room, talking intently to other members of the Gang of 40, and Ty, who was appearing via video feed. He sat somewhere else, in a blank white room, wearing his oversized hoodie and staring, not bored and not visibly interested, into the camera and into the room. And it was he, as much or more than any other Wise Men or senior Circlers, that the presenters wanted to impress. They were his children, in some sense: all of them motivated by his success, his youth, his ability to see ideas into execution, while remaining himself, perfectly aloof and yet furiously productive. They wanted that, too, and they wanted the money they knew went along with the role.
This was the assembly Kalden had been talking about, where, he was certain, there would be a maximum viewing audience, and where, he insisted, Mae should tell all her watchers that the Circle could not complete, that Completion would lead to some kind of armageddon. She had not heard from him since that conversation in the bathroom, and she was glad for it. Now she was sure, more than ever, that he was some kind of hacker-spy, someone from a would-be competitor, trying to turn Mae and whoever else against the company, to blow it up from within.
She shook all thoughts of him from her mind. This forum would be good, she knew. Dozens of Circlers had been hired this way: they came to campus as aspirants, presented an idea, and that idea was bought on the spot and the aspirant was thereafter employed. Jared had been hired this way, Mae knew, and Gina, too. It was one of the more glamorous ways to arrive at the company: to pitch an idea, have it acquired, be rewarded with employment and stock options and see their idea executed in short order.
Mae explained all of this to her watchers as the room settled. There were about fifty Circlers, the Wise Men, the Gang of 40 and a few assistants in the room, all of them facing a row of aspirants, a few of them still in their teens, each of them sitting, waiting for his or her turn.
“This will be very exciting,” Mae said to her watchers. “As you know, this is the first time we’ve broadcast an Aspirant session.” She almost said “plankton” and was happy to have caught the slur before uttering it. She glanced down at her wrist. There were 2.1 million watchers, though she expected that to climb quickly.
The first student, Faisal, looked no more than twenty. His skin glowed like lacquered wood, and his proposal was exceedingly simple: instead of having endless mini-battles over whether or not a given person’s spending activity could or could not be tracked, why not make a deal with them? For highly desirable consumers, if they agreed to use CircleMoney for all their purchases, and agreed to make their spending habits and preferences accessible to CirclePartners, then the Circle would give them discounts, points, and rebates at the end of each month. It would be like getting frequent flyer miles for using the same credit card.
Mae knew she would personally sign up for such a plan, and assumed that, by extension, so would millions more.
“Very intriguing,” Stenton said, and Mae would later learn that when he said “very intriguing” he meant that he would purchase that idea and hire its inventor.
The second notion came from an African-American woman of about twenty-two. Her name was Belinda and her idea, she said, would eliminate racial profiling by police and airport security officers. Mae began nodding; this was what she loved about her generation—the ability to see the social-justice applications to the Circle and address them surgically. Belinda brought up a video feed of a busy urban street with a few hundred people visible and walking to and from the camera, unaware they were being watched.
“Every day, police pull over people for what’s known as ‘driving while black’ or ‘driving while brown,’” Belinda said evenly, “And every day, young African-American men are stopped in the street, thrown against a wall, frisked, stripped of their rights and dignity.”
And for a moment Mae thought of Mercer, and wished he could be hearing this. Yes, sometimes some of the applications of the internet could be a bit crass and commercial, but for every one commercial application, there were three like this, proactive applications that used the power of the technology to improve humanity.
Belinda continued: “These practices only create more animosity between people of color and the police. See this crowd? It’s mostly young men of color, right? A police cruiser goes by an area like this, and they’re all suspects, right? Every one of these men might be stopped, searched, disrespected. But it doesn’t have to be that way.”
Now, on-screen, amid the crowd, three of the men in the picture were glowing orange and red. They continued to walk, to act normally, but now they were bathed in color, as if a spotlight, with colored gels, was singling them out.
“The three men you see in orange and red are repeat offenders. Orange indicates a low-level criminal—a guy convicted of petty thefts, drug possession, nonviolent and largely victimless crimes.” There were two men in the frame who had been colored orange. Walking closer to the camera, though, was an innocuous-enough seeming man of about fifty, glowing red from head to toe. “The man signaling red, though, has been convicted of violent crimes. This man has been found guilty of armed robbery, attempted rape, repeated assaults.”
Mae turned to find Stenton’s face rapt, his mouth slightly open.
Belinda continued. “We’re seeing what an officer would see if he were equipped with SeeYou. It’s a simple enough system that works through any retinal. He doesn’t have to do a thing. He scans any crowd, and he immediately sees all the people with prior convictions. Imagine if you’re a cop in New York. Suddenly a city of eight million becomes infinitely more manageable when you know where to focus your energies.”
Stenton spoke. “How do they know? Some kind of chip?”
“Maybe,” Belinda said. “It could be a chip, if we could get that to happen. Or else, even easier would be to attach a bracelet. They’ve been using ankle bracelets for decades now. So you modify it so the bracelet can be read by the retinals, and provides the tracking capability. Of course,” she said, looking to Mae with a warm smile, “you could also apply Francis’s technology, and make it a chip. But that would take some legal doing, I expect.”
Stenton leaned back. “Maybe, maybe not.”
“Well, obviously that would be ideal,” Belinda said. “And it would be permanent. You’d always know who the offenders were, whereas the bracelet is still subject to some tampering and removal. And then there are those who might say it should be removed after a certain period. The violators expunged.”
“I hate that notion,” Stenton said. “It’s the community’s right to know who’s committed crimes. It just makes sense. This is how they’ve been handling sex offenders for decades. You commit sexual offenses, you become part of a registry. Your address becomes public, you have to walk the neighborhood, introduce yourself, all that, because people have a right to know who lives in their midst.”
Belinda was nodding. “Right, right. Of course. And so, for lack of a better word, you tag the convicts, and from then on, if you’re a police officer, instead of driving down the street, shaking down anyone who happens to be black or brown or wearing baggy pants, imagine instead you were using a retinal app that saw career criminals in distinct colors—yellow for low-level offenders, orange for nonviolent but slightly more dangerous offenders, and red for the truly violent.”
Now Stenton was leaning forward. “Take it a step further. Intelligence agencies can instantly create a web of all of a suspect’s contacts, co-conspirators. It takes seconds. I wonder if there could be variations on the color scheme, to take into account those who might be known associates of a criminal, even if they haven’t personally been arrested or convicted yet. As you know, a lot of mob bosses are never convicted of anything.”
Belinda was nodding vigorously. “Yes. Absolutely,” she said. “And in those cases, you’d be using a mobile device to tag that person, given you wouldn’t have the benefit of a conviction to ensure the mandatory chip or bracelet.”
“Right. Right,” Stenton said. “There are possibilities there, though. Good things to think about. I’m intrigued.”
Belinda glowed, sat down, feigned nonchalance by smiling at Gareth, the next aspirant, who stood up, nervous and blinking. He was a tall man with cantaloupe-colored hair, and now that he had the room’s attention, he grinned shyly, crookedly.
“Well, for better or worse, my idea was similar to Belinda’s. Once we realized we were working on similar notions, we collaborated a bit. The main commonality is that we’re both interested in safety. My plan, I think, would eliminate crime block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood.”
He stood before the screen, and revealed a rendering of a small neighborhood of four blocks, twenty-five houses. Bright green lines denoted the buildings, allowing viewers to see inside; it reminded Mae of heat-reading visual displays.
“It’s based on the neighborhood watch model, where groups of neighbors look out for each other, and report any anomalous behavior. With NeighborWatch—that’s my name for this, though it could be changed of course—we leverage the power of SeeChange specifically, and the Circle generally, to make the committing of a crime, any crime, extremely difficult in a fully participating neighborhood.”
He pushed a button and now the houses were full of figures, two or three or four in each building, all of them colored blue. They moved around in their digital kitchens, bedrooms, and backyards.
“Okay, as you can see, here are the residents of the neighborhood, all going about their business. They’re rendered blue here, because they’ve all registered with NeighborWatch, and their prints, retinas, phones and even body profile have been memorized by the system.”
“This is the view any resident can see?” Stenton asked.
“Exactly. This is their home display.”
“Impressive,” Stenton said. “I’m already intrigued.”
“So as you can see, all is well in the neighborhood. Everyone who’s there is supposed to be there. But now we see what happens when an unknown person arrives.”
A figure, colored red, appeared, and walked up to the door of one of the houses. Gareth turned to the audience and raised his eyebrows.
“The system doesn’t know this man, so he’s red. Any new person entering the neighborhood would automatically trigger the computer. All the neighbors would receive a notice on their home and mobile devices that a visitor was in the neighborhood. Usually it’s no big deal. Someone’s friend or uncle is dropping by. But either way, you can see there’s a new person, and where he is.”
Stenton was sitting back, as if he knew the rest of the story but wanted to help it speed along. “I’m assuming, then, there’s a way to neutralize him.”
“Yes. The people he’s visiting can send a message to the system saying he’s with them, IDing him, vouching for him: ‘That’s Uncle George.’ Or they could do that ahead of time. So then he’s tagged blue again.”
Now Uncle George, the figure on the screen, went from red to blue, and entered the house.
“So all is well in the neighborhood again.”
“Unless there’s a real intruder,” Stenton prodded.
“Right. On the rare occasion when it’s truly someone with ill-intent…” Now the screen featured a red figure stalking outside the house, peering in the windows. “Well, then the whole neighborhood would know it. They’d know where he was, and could either stay away, call the police, confront him, whatever it is they want to do.”
“Very good. Very nice,” Stenton said.
Gareth beamed. “Thank you. And Belinda made me think that, you know, any ex-cons living in the neighborhood would register as red or orange in any display. Or some other color, where you’d know they were residents of the neighborhood, but you’d also know they were convicts or whatever.”
Stenton nodded. “It’s your right to know.”
“Seems like this solves one of the problems of SeeChange,” Stenton said, “which is that even when there are cameras everywhere, not everyone can watch everything. If a crime is committed at three a.m., who’s watching camera 982, right?”
“Right,” Gareth said. “See, this way the cameras are just part of it. The color-tagging tells you who’s anomalous, so you only have to pay attention to that particular anomaly. Of course, the catch is whether or not this violates any privacy laws.”
“Well, I don’t think that’s a problem,” Stenton said. “You have a right to know who lives on your street. What’s the difference between this and simply introducing yourself to everyone on the street? This is just a more advanced and thorough version of ‘good fences make good neighbors.’ I would imagine this would eliminate pretty much all crime committed by strangers to any given community.”
Mae glanced at her bracelet. She couldn’t count them all, but hundreds of watchers were insisting on Belinda’s and Gareth’s products, now. They asked Where? When? How much?
Now Bailey’s voice popped through. “The one unanswered question, though, is, what if the crime is committed by someone inside the neighborhood? Inside the house?”
Belinda and Gareth looked to a well-dressed woman, with very short black hair and stylish glasses. “I guess that’s my cue.” She stood and straightened her black skirt.
“My name is Finnegan, and my issue was violence against children in the home. I myself was a victim of domestic violence when I was young,” she said, taking a second to let that register. “And this crime, among all others, seems like the most difficult thing to prevent, given the perpetrators are ostensibly part of the family, right? But then I realized that all the necessary tools already exist. First, most people already have one or another monitor that can track when their anger rises to a dangerous level. Now, if we couple that tool with standard motion sensors, then we can know immediately when something bad is happening, or is about to happen. Let me give you an example. Here’s a motion sensor installed in the kitchen. These are often used in factories and even restaurant kitchens to sense whether the chef or worker is completing a given task in a standard way. I understand the Circle uses these to ensure regularity in many departments.”
“We do indeed,” Bailey said, provoking some distant laughter from the room where he was sitting.
Stenton explained: “We own the patent for that particular technology. Did you know that?”
Finnegan’s face flushed, and she seemed to be deciding whether or not to lie. Could she say she did know?
“I was not aware of that,” she said, “but I’m very glad to know that now.”
Stenton seemed impressed with her composure.
“As you know,” she continued, “in workplaces, any irregularity of movement or in the order of operations, and the computer either reminds you of what you might have forgotten, or it logs the mistake for management. So I thought, why not use the same motion sensor technology in the home, especially high-risk homes, to record any behavior outside the norm?”
“Like a smoke detector for humans,” Stenton said.
“Right. A smoke detector will go off if it senses even the slightest increase in carbon dioxide. So this is the same idea. I’ve installed a sensor here in this room, actually, and want to show you how it sees.”
On the screen behind her, a figure appeared, the size and shape of Finnegan, though featureless—a blue-shadow version of herself, mirroring her movements.
“Okay, this is me. Now watch my motions. If I walk around, then the sensors see that as within the norm.”
Behind her, her form remained blue.
“If I cut some tomatoes,” Finnegan said, miming the cutting of imaginary tomatoes, “same thing. It’s normal.”
The figure behind her, her blue shadow, mimicked her.
“But now see what happens if I do something violent.”
Finnegan raised her arms quickly and brought them down in front of her, as if hitting a child beneath her. Immediately, onscreen, her figure turned orange, and a loud alarm went off.
The alarm was a rapid rhythmic screeching. It was, Mae realized, far too loud for a demonstration. She looked to Stenton, whose eyes were round and white.
“Turn it off,” he said, barely controlling his rage.
Finnegan hadn’t heard him, and was going about her presentation as if this were part of it, an acceptable part of it. “That’s the alarm of course and—”
“Turn it off!” Stenton yelled, and this time, Finnegan heard. She flailed on her tablet, looking for the right button.
Stenton was looking at the ceiling. “Where is that sound coming from? How is it so loud?”
The screeching continued. Half the room was holding their ears.
“Turn it off or we walk out of here,” Stenton said, standing, his mouth small and furious.
Finally Finnegan found the right button and the alarm went silent.
“That was a mistake,” Stenton said. “You don’t punish the people you’re pitching. Do you understand that?”
Finnegan’s eyes were wild, vibrating, filling with tears. “Yes, I do.”
“You could have simply said an alarm goes off. No need to have the alarm go off. That’s my business lesson for today.”
“Thank you sir,” she said, her knuckles white and entwined in front of her. “Should I go on?”
“I don’t know,” Stenton said, still furious.
“Go ahead, Finnegan,” Bailey said. “Just make it quick.”
“Okay,” she said, her voice shaking, “the essence is that the sensors would be installed in every room and would be programmed to know what was within the normal boundaries, and what was anomalous. Something anomalous happens, the alarm goes off, and ideally the alarm alone stops or slows whatever’s happening in the room. Meanwhile, the authorities have been notified. You could hook it up so neighbors would be alerted, too, given they’d be the closest and most likely to be able to step in immediately and help.”
“Okay. I get it,” Stenton said. “Let’s move on.” Stenton meant move on to the next presenter, but Finnegan, showing admirable resolve, continued.
“Of course, if you combine all these technologies, you’re able to quickly ensure behavioral norms in any context. Think of prisons and schools. I mean, I went to a high school with four thousand students, and only twenty kids were troublemakers. I could imagine if teachers were wearing retinals, and could see the red-coded students from a mile away—I mean, that would eliminate most trouble. And then the sensors would pinpoint any antisocial behavior.”
Now Stenton was leaning back in his chair, his thumbs in his belt loops. He’d relaxed again. “It occurs to me that so much crime and trouble is committed because we have too much to track, right? Too many places, too many people. If we can concentrate more on isolating the outliers, and being able to better tag them and follow them, then we save endless amounts of time and distraction.”
“Exactly sir,” Finnegan said.
Stenton softened, and, looking down at his tablet, seemed to be seeing what Mae was seeing on her wrist: Finnegan, and her program, were immensely popular. The dominant messages were coming from victims of various crimes: women and children who had been abused in their homes, saying the obvious: If only this had been around ten years ago, fifteen years ago. At least, they all said in one way or another, this kind of thing will never happen again.
When Mae returned to her desk, there was a note, on paper, from Annie. “Can you see me? Just text ‘now’ when you can, and I’ll meet you in the bathroom.”
Ten minutes later Mae was sitting in her usual stall, and heard Annie enter the one next door. Mae was relieved that Annie had reached out to her, thrilled at having her so close again. Mae could right all wrongs now, and was determined to do so.
“Are we alone?” Annie asked.
“Audio’s off for three minutes. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. It’s just this PastPerfect thing. They’re starting to dole out the results to me, and it’s already pretty disturbing. And tomorrow it goes public, and I’m assuming it’ll get even worse.”
“Wait. What did they find? I thought they were starting in the Middle Ages or something.”
“They are. But even then, it’s like both sides of my family are these blackhearted people. I mean, I didn’t even know the British had Irish slaves, did you?”
“No. I don’t think so. You mean, white Irish slaves?”
“Thousands of them. My ancestors were the ringleaders or something. They raided Ireland, brought back slaves, sold them all over the world. It’s so f*cked up.”
“Annie—”
“I mean, I know they’re sure about this because it’s cross-referenced a few thousand ways, but do I look like a descendent of slave owners?”
“Annie, give yourself a break. Something that happened six hundred years ago has nothing to do with you. Everyone’s bloodline has rough patches, I’m sure. You can’t take it personally.”
“Sure, but at the very least it’s embarrassing, right? It means that it’s part of me, at least to everyone I know. To the next people I see, this’ll be part of me. They’ll be seeing me, and talking to me, but this will be part of me, too. It’s mapped this new layer onto me, and I don’t feel like that’s fair. It’s like if I knew your dad was a former Klansman—”
“You’re completely overthinking it. No one, I mean no one, will look at you funny because some ancient ancestor of yours had slaves from Ireland. I mean, it’s so insane, and so distant, that no one will possibly connect you to it. You know how people are. No one can remember anything like that anyway. And to hold you responsible? No chance.”
“And they killed a bunch of these slaves, too. There’s some story about a rebellion, and that some relative of mine led some mass slaughter of a thousand men and women and children. It’s so sick. I just—”
“Annie. Annie. You’ve got to calm down. First of all, our time’s up. Audio’s going back up in a second. Secondly, you just cannot worry about this. These people were practically cavemen. Everyone’s cavemen ancestors were assholes.”
Annie laughed, a loud snort.
“Promise me you won’t worry?”
“Sure.”
“Annie. Don’t worry about this. Promise me.”
“Okay.”
“You promise?”
“I promise. I’ll try not to.”
“Okay. Time.”
When the news of Annie’s ancestors went out the next day, Mae felt at least partially vindicated. There were some unproductive comments out there, sure, but for the most part the reaction was a collective shrug. No one cared much about how this connected to Annie, but there was new and possibly useful attention brought to the long-forgotten moment in history, when the British went to Ireland and left with human currency.
Annie seemed to be taking it all in stride. Her zings were positive, and she recorded a brief announcement for her video feed, talking about the surprise in finding out this unfortunate role some distant part of her bloodline played in this grim historical moment. But then she tried to add some perspective and levity to it, and to ensure that this revelation wouldn’t dissuade others from exploring their personal history through PastPerfect. “Everyone’s ancestors were assholes,” she said, and Mae, watching the feed on her bracelet, laughed.
But Mercer, true to form, was not laughing. Mae hadn’t heard from him in over a month, but then, in Friday’s mail (the only day the post office still operated), was a letter. She didn’t want to read it, because she knew it would be ornery, and accusatory and judgmental. But he’d already written a letter like that, hadn’t he? She opened it, guessing that he couldn’t possibly be worse than he’d been before.
She was wrong. This time he couldn’t even bring himself to type the Dear before her name.
Mae,
I know I said I wouldn’t write again. But now that Annie’s on the verge of ruin, I hope that gives you some pause. Please tell her she should cease her participation in that experiment, which I assure you and her will end badly. We are not meant to know everything, Mae. Did you ever think that perhaps our minds are delicately calibrated between the known and the unknown? That our souls need the mysteries of night and the clarity of day? You people are creating a world of ever-present daylight, and I think it will burn us all alive. There will be no time to reflect, to sleep, to cool. Did it occur to you Circle people, ever, that we can only contain so much? Look at us. We’re tiny. Our heads are tiny, the size of melons. You want these heads of ours to contain everything the world has ever seen? It will not work.
Mae’s wrist was popping.
Why do you bother, Mae?
I’m already bored.
You’re only feeding Sasquatch. Don’t feed Sasquatch!
Her heart was already thumping, and she knew she shouldn’t read the rest. But she couldn’t stop.
I happened to be at my parents’ house when you did your little idea meeting with the Digital Brownshirts. They insisted on watching it; they’re so proud of you, despite how horrifying that session was. Even so, I’m glad I watched that spectacle (just as I’m glad I watched Triumph of the Will). It gave me the last nudge I needed to take the step I’d been planning anyway.
I’m moving north, to the densest and most uninteresting forest I can find. I know that your cameras are mapping out these areas as they have mapped the Amazon, Antarctica, the Sahara, etc. But at least I’ll have a head start. And when the cameras come, I’ll keep going north.
Mae, I have to admit that you and yours have won. It’s pretty much over, and now I know that. But before that pitch session, I held out some hope that the madness was limited to your own company, to the brainwashed thousands who work for you or the millions who worship around the golden calf that is the Circle. I held out hope that there were those who would rise up against you people. Or that a new generation would see all this as ludicrous, oppressive, utterly out of control.
Mae checked her wrist. There were already four new Mercer-hating clubs online. Someone offered to erase his bank account. Just say the word, the message read.
But now I know that even if someone were to strike you down, if the Circle ended tomorrow, something worse would probably take its place. There are a thousand more Wise Men out there, people with ever-more radical ideas about the criminality of privacy. Every time I think it can’t get worse, I see some nineteen-year-old whose ideas make the Circle seem like some ACLUtopia. And you people (and I know now that you people are most people) are impossible to scare. No amount of surveillance causes the least concern or provokes any resistance.
It’s one thing to want to measure yourself, Mae—you and your bracelets. I can accept you and yours tracking your own movements, recording everything you do, collecting data on yourself in the interest of…Well, whatever it is you’re trying to do. But it’s not enough, is it? You don’t want just your data, you need mine. You’re not complete without it. It’s a sickness.
So I’m gone. By the time you read this, I’ll be off the grid, and I expect that others will join me. In fact, I know others will join me. We’ll be living underground, and in the desert, in the woods. We’ll be like refugees, or hermits, some unfortunate but necessary combination of the two. Because this is what we are.
I expect this is some second great schism, where two humanities will live, apart but parallel. There will be those who live under the surveillance dome you’re helping to create, and those who live, or try to live, apart from it. I’m scared to death for us all.
Mercer
She’d read the note on camera, and she knew that her viewers were finding it as bizarre and hilarious as she had. The comments were popping, and there were some good ones. Now the Sasquatch will return to his natural habitat! and Good riddance, Bigfoot. But Mae was so entertained by it that she sought out Francis, who, by the time they saw each other, had already seen the note transcribed and posted onto a half-dozen sub-sites; one watcher in Missoula had already read it while wearing a powdered wig, the background filled with faux-patriotic music. That video had been seen three million times. Mae laughed, watching it twice herself, but found she felt for Mercer. He was stubborn, but he was not stupid. He was not beyond hope. He was not beyond convincing.
The next day, Annie left her another paper note, and again they planned to meet in their adjoining stalls. Mae only hoped that since the second round of major revelations, Annie had found a way to contextualize it. Mae saw the tip of Annie’s shoe under the next stall. She turned off her audio.
“You heard it got worse, right?”
“I did hear something. Have you been crying? Annie—”
“Mae, I don’t think I can handle this. I mean, it was one thing to know about the ancestors in jolly Olde. But there was a part of me that was thinking, you know, that’s fine, my people came to North America, started anew, put all that in the past. But sh*t, Mae, knowing that they were slave owners here, too? I mean, that is f*cking stupid. What kind of people am I from? It has to be some disease in me, too.”
“Annie. You can’t think about this.”
“Of course I can. I can’t think of anything else—”
“Okay. Fine. But first, calm down. And second, you can’t take it personally. You have to separate yourself from it. You have to see it a bit more abstractly.”
“And I’ve been getting all this crazy hate mail. I got six messages this morning from people calling me Massa Annie. Half the people of color I hired over the years are now suspicious of me. Like I’m some genetically pure intergenerational slave owner! Now I can’t handle having Vickie work for me. I’m letting her go tomorrow.”
“Annie, you know how crazy this all sounds? I mean, besides, are you sure your ancestors here had black slaves? The slaves weren’t Irish here, too?”
Annie sighed loudly.
“No. No. My people went from owning Irish people to owning African people. How’s that? Couldn’t keep my people from owning people. You also saw that they fought for the Confederate side in the Civil War?”
“I saw that, but there’s millions of people whose ancestors fought for the South. The country was at war, half and half.”
“Not my half. I mean, do you know the chaos this is wreaking on my family?”
“But they never took all this family heritage stuff seriously, did they?”
“Not when they assumed we were bluebloods, Mae! Not when they thought we were Mayflower people with this unimpeachable lineage! Now they take it really f*cking seriously. My mom hasn’t left the house in two days. I don’t want to know what they find next.”
What they found next, two days later, was far worse. Mae didn’t know, ahead of time, precisely what it was, but she did know that Annie knew, and that Annie had sent a very strange zing out into the world. It said Actually, I don’t know if we should know everything. When they met in the stalls, Mae couldn’t believe Annie’s fingers had actually typed that sentence. The Circle couldn’t delete it, of course, but someone—Mae hoped it was Annie—had amended it to say We shouldn’t know everything—without the proper storage ready. You don’t want to lose it!
“Of course I sent it,” Annie said. “The first one anyway.”
Mae had held out hope that it was some terrible glitch.
“How could you have sent that?”
“It’s what I believe, Mae. You have no idea.”
“I know I don’t. What idea do you have? You know what kind of sh*t you’re in? How can you of all people espouse an idea like that? You’re the poster child for open access to the past and now you’re saying…What are you saying, anyway?”
“Oh f*ck, I don’t know. I just know I’m done. I need to shut it down.”
“PastPerfect. Anything like it.”
“You know you can’t.”
“I’m planning to try.”
“You must already be in deep sh*t.”
“I am. But the Wise Men owe me this one favor. I can’t handle this. I mean, they’ve already quote-unquote relieved me of some of my duties. Whatever. I don’t even care. But if they don’t shut it down I’ll go into some kind of coma. I already feel like I can barely stand or breathe.”
They sat in silence for a moment. Mae wondered if she shouldn’t leave. Annie was losing her hold on something very central about herself; she felt volatile, capable of rash and irrevocable acts. Talking to her, at all, was a risk.
Now she heard Annie gasping.
“Annie. Breathe.”
“I just told you I can’t. I haven’t slept in two days.”
“So what happened?” Mae asked.
“Oh f*ck, everything. Nothing. They found some weird stuff with my parents. I mean, a lot of weird stuff.”
“When does it go live?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Okay. Maybe it’s not as bad as you think.”
“It’s so much worse than you can imagine.”
“Tell me. I bet it’s fine.”
“It’s not fine, Mae. It’s anything but fine. The first thing is that I found out my dad and mom had some kind of open marriage or something. I haven’t even asked them about it. But there are photos and video of them with all kinds of other people. I mean, like, serial adultery on both sides. Is that fine?”
“How do you know it was an affair? I mean, if they were just walking next to someone? And it was the eighties, right?”
“More like the nineties. And trust me. It’s definitive.”
“Like sex photos?”
“No. But kissy photos. I mean, there’s one with my dad with his hand around some woman’s waist, his other hand on her tit. I mean, sick sh*t. Other pictures with Mom and some bearded guy, a series of naked photos. Apparently the guy died, had this stash of photos, they were bought at some garage sale and scanned and put in the cloud. Then when they did the global facial-rec, ta-da, Mom’s naked with some biker guy. I mean, the two of them just standing there sometimes, naked, like posing for prom.”
“I’m sorry.”
“And who took the pictures? There’s some third guy in the room? Who was that? A helpful neighbor?”
“Have you asked them about it?”
“No. But that’s the better part of it. I was about to confront them when this other thing popped up. It’s so much worse that I don’t even care about the affairs. I mean, the pictures were nothing compared to the video they found.”
“What about the video?”
“Okay. This was one of the rare times the two of them were actually together—at night at least. This is from some video taken at some pier. There was a security camera there, because I guess they store stuff in the warehouses there on the water. So there’s a tape of my parents hanging around this pier at night.”
“No, it’s much worse. Oh f*ck, it’s so bad. Mae, it’s f*cking so twisted. You know my parents do this thing every so often—they sort of have a couples night where they go on some bender? They’ve told me about it. They get stoned, drunk, go dancing, stay out all night. It’s on their anniversary every year. Sometimes it’s in the city, sometimes they go somewhere like Mexico. It’s like some all-night thing to keep them young, keep their marriage fresh, whatever.”
“Okay.”
“So I know this happened on their anniversary. I was six years old.”
“So?”
“It’s one thing if I hadn’t been born—Oh sh*t. So anyway. I don’t know what they were doing beforehand, but they show up on this surveillance camera around one a.m. They’re drinking a bottle of wine, and kind of dangling their feet over the water, and it all seems pretty innocent and boring for a while. But then this man comes into the frame. He’s like some kind of homeless guy, stumbling around. And my parents look at him, and watch him wandering around and stuff. It looks like he says something to them, and they sort of laugh and go back to their wine. Then nothing happens for a while, and the homeless guy’s out of the frame. Then about ten minutes later he’s back in the frame, and then he falls off the pier and into the water.”
Mae took in a quick breath. She knew it was making this worse. “Did your parents see him fall?”
Now Annie was sobbing. “That’s the problem. They totally did. It happened about three feet from where they were sitting. On the tape you see them get up, sort of lean over, yelling down into the water. You can tell they’re freaking out. Then they sort of look around, to see if there’s a phone or anything.”
“And was there?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t look like it. They never really left the frame. That’s what’s so f*cked up. They see this guy drop into the water and they just stay there. They don’t run to get help, or call the police or anything. They don’t jump in to save the guy. After a few minutes of freaking out, they just sit down again, and my mom puts her head on my dad’s shoulder, and the two of them stay there for another ten minutes or something, and then they get up and leave.”
“Maybe they were in shock.”
“Mae, they just got up and left. They never called 911 or anything. There’s no record of it. They never reported it. But the body was found the next day. The guy wasn’t even homeless. He was maybe a little mentally disabled but he lived with his parents and worked at a deli, washing dishes. My parents just watched him drown.”
Now Annie was choking on her tears.
“Have you told them about this?”
“No. I can’t talk to them. They’re really disgusting to me right now.”
“But it hasn’t been released yet?”
Annie looked at the time. “It will be soon. Less than twelve hours.”
“And Bailey said?”
“He can’t do anything. You know him.”
“Maybe there’s something I can do,” Mae said, having no idea what. Annie gave no sign she believed Mae capable of slowing or stopping the storm coming her way.
“It’s so sick. Oh sh*t,” Annie said, as if the realization had just passed through her. “Now I don’t have parents.”
When their time was up, Annie returned to her office, where, she said, she planned to lie down indefinitely, and Mae returned to her old pod. She needed to think. She stood in the doorway, where she’d seen Kalden watch her, and she watched the CE newbies, taking comfort in their honest work, their nodding heads. Their murmurs of assent and disapproval gave her a sense of order and rightness. The occasional Circler looked up to smile at her, to wave chastely at the camera, at her audience, before returning to the work at hand. Mae felt a surging pride in them, in the Circle, in attracting pure souls like this. They were open. They were truthful. They did not hide or hoard or obfuscate.
There was a newbie close to her, a man of no more than twenty-two, with wild hair rising from his head like smoke, working with such concentration that he hadn’t noticed Mae standing behind him. His fingers were typing furiously, fluidly, almost silently, as he simultaneously answered customer queries and survey questions. “No, no, smile, frown,” he said, nodding with a quick and effortless pace. “Yes, yes, no, Cancun, deep-sea diving, upscale resort, breakaway weekend, January, January, meh, three, two, smile, smile, meh, yes, Prada, Converse, no, frown, frown, smile, Paris.”
Watching him, the solution to Annie’s problem seemed obvious. She needed support. Annie needed to know she wasn’t alone. And then it all clicked. Of course the solution was built into the Circle itself. There were millions of people out there who no doubt would stand behind Annie, and would show their support in myriad unexpected and heartfelt ways. Suffering is only suffering if it’s done in silence, in solitude. Pain experienced in public, in view of loving millions, was no longer pain. It was communion.
Mae turned from the doorway and made her way to the roofdeck. She had a duty here, not only to Annie, her friend, but to her watchers. And being witness to the honesty and openness of the newbies, of this young man with his wild hair, made her feel hypocritical. As she climbed the stairs, she assessed her options and herself. Moments ago, she’d purposely obfuscated. She’d been the opposite of open, the opposite of honest. She’d hidden audio from the world, which was tantamount to lying to the world, to the millions who assumed she was being straightforward always, transparent always.
She looked out over the campus. Her watchers wondered what she was looking at, why the silence.
“I want you all to see what I see,” she said.
Annie wanted to hide, to suffer alone, to cover up. And Mae wanted to honor this, to be loyal. But could loyalty to one trump loyalty to millions? Wasn’t it this kind of thinking, favoring the personal and temporary gain over the greater good, that made possible any number of historical horrors? Again the solution seemed in front of her, all around her. Mae needed to help Annie and re-purify her own practice of transparency, and both could be done with one brave act. She checked the time. She had two hours until her SoulSearch presentation. She stepped onto the roofdeck, organizing her thoughts into some lucid statement. Soon she made her way to the bathroom, to the scene of the crime, as it were, and by the time she’d arrived, and saw herself in the mirror, she knew what she needed to say. She took a breath.
“Hello, watchers. I have an announcement to make, and it’s a painful one. But I think it’s the right thing to do. Just an hour ago, as many of you know, I entered this bathroom, ostensibly under the auspices of doing my business in the second stall you see over here.” She turned to the row of stalls. “But when I entered, I sat down, and with the audio off, I had a private conversation with a friend of mine, Annie Allerton.”
Already a few hundred messages were shooting through her wrist, the most-favored one thus far already forgiving her: Mae, bathroom talk is allowed! Don’t worry. We believe in you.
“To those sending your good words to me, I want to thank you,” Mae said. “But more important than my own admission is what Annie and I talked about. You see, many of you know that Annie’s been part of an experiment here, a program to trace one’s ancestry as far back as technology will allow. And she’s found some unfortunate things in the deep recesses of her history. Some of her ancestors committed serious misdeeds, and it’s got her sick about it all. Worse, tomorrow, another unfortunate episode will be revealed, this one more recent, and perhaps more painful.”
Mae glanced at her bracelet, seeing that the active viewers had nearly doubled in the last minute, to 3,202,984. She knew that many people kept her feed on their screens as they worked, but were rarely actively watching. Now it was clear her impending announcement had the focused attention of millions. And, she thought, she needed the compassion of these millions to cushion tomorrow’s fall. Annie deserved it.
“So my friends, I think we need to harness the power of the Circle. We need to harness the compassion out there, of all the people out there who already know and love Annie, or who can empathize with Annie. I hope you can all send her your good wishes, your own stories of finding out about some dark spots in your family past, and make Annie feel less alone. Tell her you’re on her side. Tell her you like her just the same, and that some distant ancestor’s crimes have no bearing on her, don’t change the way you think about Annie.”
Mae finished by providing Annie’s email address, Zing feed and profile page. The reaction was immediate. Annie’s followers increased from 88,198 to 243,087—and, as Mae’s announcement was passed around, would likely pass a million by the end of the day. The messages poured in, the most popular being one that said The past is past, and Annie is Annie. It didn’t make perfect sense, but Mae appreciated the sentiment. Another message gaining traction said, Not to rain on the parade, but I think there is evil in DNA, and I would worry about Annie. Annie needs to try doubly hard to prove to someone like myself, an African-American whose ancestors were enslaved, that she’s on the path of justice.
That comment had 98,201 smiles, and almost as many frowns, 80,198. But overall, as Mae scrolled through the messages, there was—as always when people were asked for their feelings—love, and there was understanding, and there was a desire to let the past be the past.
As Mae followed the reaction, she watched the clock, knowing she was only an hour away from her presentation, her first in the Enlightenment’s Great Room. She felt ready, though, with this Annie business emboldening her, making her feel, more than ever, that she had legions at her back. She also knew that the technology itself, and the Circle community, would determine the success of the demonstration. As she prepared, she watched her bracelet for any sign of Annie. She had expected some reaction by now, certainly something like gratitude, given that Annie was no doubt inundated by, buried under, an avalanche of goodwill.
But there was nothing.
She sent Annie a series of zings, but heard no reply. She checked Annie’s whereabouts, and found her, a pulsing red dot, in her office. Mae thought, briefly, about visiting her—but decided against it. She had to focus, and perhaps it was better to let Annie take it all in, alone. Certainly by the afternoon, she would have taken in and synthesized the warmth of the millions who cared for her, and would be ready to properly thank Mae, to tell her how, now with the new perspective, she could put the crimes of her relatives in context, and could move forward, into the solvable future, and not backward, into the chaos of an unfixable past.
“You did a very brave thing today,” Bailey said. “It was brave and it was correct.”
They were backstage in the Great Room. Mae was dressed in a black skirt and a red silk blouse, both new. A stylist orbited around her, applying powder to Mae’s nose and forehead, Vaseline to her lips. She was a few minutes away from her first major presentation.
“Normally I would want to talk about why you’d chosen to obfuscate in the first place,” he said, “but your honesty was real, and I know you’ve already learned any lesson I could give you. We’re very happy to have you here, Mae.”
“Thank you, Eamon.”
“Are you ready?”
“I think so.”
“Well, make us proud out there.”
As she stepped onto the stage, into the bright single spotlight, Mae felt confident that she could. Before she could get to the lucite podium, though, the applause was sudden and thunderous and almost knocked her off her feet. She made her way to her appointed spot, but the thunder only got louder. The audience stood, first the front rows, then everyone. It took Mae great effort to quell their noise and allow her to speak.
“Hello everyone, I’m Mae Holland,” she said, and the applause started again. She had to laugh, and when she did, the room got louder. The love felt real and overwhelming. Openness is all, she thought. Truth was its own reward. That might make a good tile, she thought, and pictured it laser-cut in stone. This was too good, she thought, all of this. She looked out to the Circlers, letting them clap, feeling a new strength surge through her. It was strength amassed through giving. She gave all to them, gave them unmitigated truth, complete transparency, and they gave her their trust, their tidal love.
“Okay, okay,” she said, finally, raising her hands, urging the audience into their seats. “Today we’re going to demonstrate the ultimate search tool. You’ve heard about SoulSearch, maybe a rumor here and there, and now we’re putting it to the test, in front of the entire Circle audience here and globally. Do you feel ready?”
The crowd cheered its answer.
“What you’re about to see is completely spontaneous and unrehearsed. Even I don’t know who we’ll be searching for today. He or she will be chosen at random from a database of known fugitives worldwide.”
Onscreen, a giant digital globe spun.
“As you know, much of what we do here at the Circle is using social media to create a safer and saner world. This has already been achieved in myriad ways, of course. Our WeaponSensor program, for example, recently went live, and registers the entry of any gun into any building, provoking an alarm that alerts all residents and the local police. That’s been beta-tested in two neighborhoods in Cleveland for the last five weeks, and there’s been a 57 percent drop in gun crimes. Not bad, right?”
Mae paused for applause, feeling very comfortable, and knowing what she was about to present would change the world, immediately and permanently.
“Fine job so far,” said the voice in her ear. It was Stenton. He’d let her know he would be Additional Guidance today. SoulSearch was a particular interest of his, and he wanted to be present to guide its introduction.
Mae took a breath.
“But one of the strangest facets of our world is how fugitives from justice can hide in a world as interconnected as ours. It took us ten years to find Osama bin Laden. D. B. Cooper, the infamous thief who leapt from an airplane with a suitcase of money, remains on the lam, decades after his escape. But this kind of thing should end now. And I believe it will, now.”
A silhouette appeared behind her. It was the shape of a human, torso and up, with the familiar mug-shot measurements in the background.
“In seconds, the computer will select, at random, a fugitive from justice. I don’t know who it will be. No one does. Whoever it is, though, he’s been proven a menace to our global community, and our assertion is that whoever he or she is, SoulSearch will locate him or her within twenty minutes. Ready?”
Murmurs filled the room, followed by scattered applause.
“Good,” Mae said. “Let’s select that fugitive.”
Pixel by pixel, the silhouette slowly became an actual and specific person, and when the selection was finished, a face had emerged, and Mae was shocked to find it was a woman. A hard-looking face, squinting into a police camera. Something about this woman, her small eyes and straight mouth, brought to mind the photography of Dorothea Lange—those sun-scarred faces of the Dust Bowl. But as the profile data appeared beneath this photo, Mae realized the woman was British and very much alive. She scanned the information onscreen and focused the audience on the essentials.
“Okay. This is Fiona Highbridge. Forty-four years old. Born in Manchester, England. She was convicted of triple murder in 2002. She locked her three children in a closet and went to Spain for a month. They all starved. They were all under five. She was sent to prison in England but escaped, with the help of a guard who she apparently seduced. It’s been a decade since anyone’s seen her, and police have all but given up on finding her. But I believe we can, now that we have the tools and the participation of the Circle.”
“Good,” Stenton said into Mae’s ear. “Let’s focus now on the UK.”
“As you all know, yesterday we alerted all three billion Circle users that today we’d have a world-changing announcement. So we currently have this many people watching the live feed.” Mae turned back to the screen and watched a counter tick up to 1,109,001,887. “Okay, over a billion people are watching. And now let’s see how many we have in the UK.” A second counter spun, and landed on 14,028,981. “All right. The information we have says that her passport was revoked years ago, so Fiona is probably still in the UK. Do you all think fourteen million Brits and a billion global participants can find Fiona Highbridge in twenty minutes?”
The audience roared, but Mae didn’t, in fact, know if it would work. She wouldn’t have been surprised, actually, if it didn’t—or if it took thirty minutes, an hour. But then again, there was always something unexpected, something miraculous about the outcomes when the full power of the Circle’s users was brought to bear. She was sure it would be done by the end of lunch.
“Okay, everyone ready? Let’s bring up the clock.” A giant six-digit timer appeared in the corner of the screen, indicating hours, minutes, and seconds.
“Let me show you some of the groups we have working together on this. Let’s see the University of East Anglia.” A feed showing many hundreds of students, in a large auditorium, appeared. They cheered. “Let’s see the city of Leeds.” Now a shot of a public square, full of people, bundled up in what appeared to be cold and blustery weather. “We have dozens of groups all over the country, who will be banding together, in addition to the power of the network as a whole. Everyone ready?” The Manchester crowd raised their hands and cheered, and the students of East Anglia did, too.
“Good,” Mae said. “Now on your mark, get set. Go.”
Mae drew her hand down, next to the photo of Fiona Highbridge, a series of columns showed the comment feed, the highest-ranked appearing at the top. The most popular thus far was from a man named Simon Hensley, from Brighton: Are we sure we want to find this hag? She looks like the Scarecrow from Wizard of Oz.
There were laughs throughout the auditorium.
“Okay. Time to get serious,” Mae said.
Another column featured users’ own photos, posted according to relevance. Within three minutes, there were 201 photos posted, most of them close corollaries to the face of Fiona Highbridge. On screen, votes were tallying, indicating which of the photos were most likely her. In four minutes it was down to five prime candidates. One was in Bend, Oregon. Another was in Banff, Canada. Another in Glasgow. Then something magical happened, something only possible when the full Circle was working toward a single goal: two of the photos, the crowd realized, were taken in the same town: Carmarthen, in Wales. Both looked like the same woman, and both looked exactly like Fiona Highbridge.
In another ninety seconds someone identified this woman. She was known as Fatima Hilensky, which the crowd voted was a promising indicator. Would someone trying to disappear change their name completely, or would they feel safer with the same initials, with a name like this—different enough to throw off any casual pursuers, but allowing her to use a slight variation on her old signature?
Seventy-nine watchers lived in or near Carmarthen, and three of them posted messages claiming they saw her more or less daily. This was promising enough, but then, in a comment that quickly shot to the top with hundreds of thousands of votes, a woman, Gretchen Karapcek, posting from her mobile phone, said she worked with the woman in the photo, at a commercial laundry outside Swansea. The crowd urged Gretchen to find her, there and then, and capture her by photo or video. Immediately, Gretchen turned on the video function on her phone and—though there were still millions of people investigating other leads—most viewers were convinced Gretchen had the right person. Mae, and most watchers, were riveted, watching Gretchen’s camera weave through enormous, steaming machines, coworkers looking curiously at her as she passed quickly through the cavernous space and ever-closer to a woman in the distance, thin and bent, feeding a bedsheet between two massive wheels.
Mae checked the clock. Six minutes, 33 seconds. She was sure this was Fiona Highbridge. There was something in the shape of her head, something in her mannerisms, and now, as she raised her eyes and caught sight of Gretchen’s camera gliding toward her, a clear recognition that something very serious was happening. It was not a look of pure surprise or bewilderment. It was the look of an animal caught rooting through the garbage. A feral look of guilt and recognition.
For a second, Mae held her breath, and it seemed that the woman would give up, and would speak to the camera, admitting her crimes and acknowledging she’d been found.
Instead, she ran.
For a long moment, the holder of the camera stood, and her camera showed only Fiona Highbridge—for there was no doubt now that it was her—as she fled quickly through the room and up the stairs.
“Follow her!” Mae finally yelled, and Gretchen Karapcek and her camera began pursuit. Mae worried, momentarily, that this would be some botched effort, a fugitive found but then quickly lost by a fumbling coworker. The camera jostled wildly, up the concrete stairs, through a cinderblock hallway, and finally approached a door, the white sky visible through its small square window.
And when the door broke open, Mae saw, with great relief, that Fiona Highbridge was trapped against a wall, surrounded by a dozen people, most of them holding their phones to her, aiming them at her. There was no possibility of escape. Her face was wild, at once terrified and defiant. She seemed to be looking for gaps in the throng, some hole she could slip through. “Gotcha, kid-killer,” someone in the crowd said, and Fiona Highbridge collapsed, sliding to the ground, covering her face.
In seconds, most of the crowd’s video feeds were available on the Great Room screen, and the audience could see a mosaic of Fiona Highbridge, her cold hard face from ten angles, all of them confirming her guilt.
“Lynch her!” someone outside the laundry yelled.
“She must be kept safe,” Stenton hissed into Mae’s ear.
“Keep her safe,” Mae pleaded with the mob. “Has someone called the police—the constables?”
In a few seconds, sirens could be heard, and when Mae saw the two cars race across the parking lot, she checked the time again. When the four officers reached Fiona Highbridge and applied handcuffs to her, the clock on the Great Room screen read 10 minutes, 26 seconds.
“I guess that’s it,” Mae said, and stopped the clock.
The audience exploded with cheers, and the participants who had trapped Fiona Highbridge were congratulated worldwide in seconds.
“Let’s cut the video feed,” Stenton said to Mae, “in the interest of allowing her some dignity.”
Mae repeated the directive to the techs. The feeds showing Highbridge dropped out, and the screen went black again.
“Well,” Mae said to the audience. “That was actually a lot easier than even I thought it would be. And we only needed a few of the tools now at the world’s disposal.”
“Let’s do another!” someone yelled.
Mae smiled. “Well, we could,” she said, and looked to Bailey, standing in the wings. He shrugged.
“Maybe not another fugitive,” Stenton said into her earpiece. “Let’s try a regular civilian.”
A smile overtook Mae’s face.
“Okay everyone,” she said, as she quickly found a photo on her tablet and transferred it to the screen behind her. It was a snapshot of Mercer taken three years earlier, just after they’d stopped dating, when they were still close, the two of them standing at the entrance to a coastal trail they were about to hike.
She had not, before just then, once thought of using the Circle to find Mercer, but now it seemed to make perfect sense. How better to prove to him the reach and power of the network and the people on it? His skepticism would fall away.
“Okay,” Mae said to the audience. “Our second target today is not a fugitive from justice, but you might say he’s a fugitive from, well, friendship.”
She smiled, acknowledging the laughter in the room.
“This is Mercer Medeiros. I haven’t seen him in a few months, and would love to see him again. Like Fiona Highbridge, though, he’s someone who is trying not to be found. So let’s see if we can break our previous record. Everyone ready? Let’s start the clock.” And the clock started.
Within ninety seconds there were hundreds of posts from people who knew him—from grade school, high school, college, work. There were even a few pictures featuring Mae, which entertained all involved. Then, though, much to Mae’s horror, there was a yawning gap, of four and a half minutes, when no one offered any valuable information on where he was now. An ex-girlfriend said she, too, would like to know his whereabouts, given he had a whole scuba apparatus that belonged to her. That was the most relevant message for a time, but then a zing appeared from Jasper, Oregon, and was immediately voted to the top of the scroll.
I’ve seen this guy at our local grocery. Let me check.
And that poster, Adam Frankenthaler, got in touch with his neighbors, and quickly there was agreement that they had all seen Mercer—in the liquor store, in the grocery, at the library. But then there was another excruciating pause, almost two minutes, where no one could figure out quite where he lived. The clock said 7:31.
“Okay,” Mae said. “This is where the more powerful tools come into play. Let’s check local real estate sites for rental histories. Let’s check credit card records, phone records, library memberships, anything he would have signed up for. Oh wait.” Mae looked up to see two addresses had been found, both in the same tiny Oregon town. “Do we know how we got those?” she asked, but it hardly seemed to matter. Things were moving too quickly now.
In the next few minutes, cars converged on both addresses, their passengers filming their arrival. One address was above a homeopathic medicine outlet in town, great redwoods rising high above. A camera showed a hand knocking on the door, and then peering into the window. There was no answer at first, but finally the door opened, and the camera panned down to find a tiny boy, about five, seeing a crowd at his doorstep, looking terrified.
“Is Mercer Medeiros here?” said a voice.
The boy turned, disappearing into the dark house. “Dad!”
For a moment Mae panicked, thinking that this boy was Mercer’s—it was happening too quickly for her to do the math properly. He already has a son? No, she realized, this couldn’t be his biological child. Maybe he’d moved in with a woman who had kids already?
But when the shadow of a man emerged into the light of the doorway, it was not Mercer. It was a goateed man of about forty, in a flannel shirt and sweatpants. Dead end. Just over eight minutes had elapsed.
The second address was found. It was in the woods, high up a mountain slope. The main video feed behind Mae switched to this view, as a car raced up a winding driveway to stop at a large grey cabin.
This time the camerawork was more professional and clear. Someone was filming a participant, a grinning young woman, knocking on the door, her eyebrows dancing up and down with mischief.
“Mercer?” she said to the door. “Mercer, you in there?” The familiarity in her voice was momentarily unnerving to Mae. “You in there making some chandeliers?”
Mae’s stomach turned. She had a sense that Mercer would not like that question, the dismissive tone of it. She wanted his face to appear as soon as possible, so she could speak to him directly. But no one answered the door.
“Mercer!” the young woman said. “I know you’re in there. We see your car.” The camera panned to the driveway, where Mae saw, with a thrill, that it was indeed Mercer’s pickup. When the camera panned back, it revealed a crowd of ten or twelve people, most of them looking like locals, in baseball hats and at least one in camouflage gear. By the time the camera arrived back at the front door, the crowd had begun to chant. “Mercer! Mercer! Mercer!”
Mae looked at the clock. Nine minutes, 24 seconds. They would break the Fiona Highbridge record by at least a minute. But first he had to come to the door.
“Go around,” the young woman said, and now the feed followed a second camera, peering around the porch and into the windows. Inside, no figures were visible. There were fishing poles, and a stack of antlers, and books and papers in piles by dusty couches and chairs. On the mantel, Mae was sure she could see a photo she recognized, of Mercer with his brothers and parents, on a trip they’d taken to Yosemite. She remembered the photo, and was sure of the figures in it, because it had always struck her as strange and wonderful, the fact that Mercer, who was sixteen at the time, was leaning his head on his mother’s shoulder, in an unguarded expression of filial love.
“Mercer! Mercer! Mercer!” the voices chanted.
But it was very possible, Mae realized, that he was on a hike or, like some caveman, out collecting firewood and might not return for hours. She was ready to turn back to the audience, call the search a success, and cut the demonstration short—they had, after all, found him, beyond the shadow of a doubt—when she heard a shrieking voice.
“There he is! Driveway!”
And both cameras began to move and shake as they ran from the porch to the Toyota. There was a figure getting into the truck, and Mae knew it was Mercer, as the cameras descended upon him. But as they got close—close enough for Mae to be heard—he was already backing down the driveway.
A figure was running alongside the truck, a young man, who could be seen attaching something to the passenger-side window. Mercer backed into the main road and sped off. There was a chaos of running and laughter, as all the participants assembled at Mercer’s house got into their cars to follow him.
A message from one of the followers explained that he’d put a SeeChange camera on the passenger window, and instantly it was activated and appeared onscreen, showing a very clear picture of Mercer driving.
Mae knew this camera had only one-way audio, so she couldn’t speak to Mercer. But she knew she had to. He wouldn’t know, yet, that it was she who was behind this. She needed to assure him this wasn’t some creepy stalking expedition. That it was his friend Mae, simply demonstrating their SoulSearch program, and all she wanted was to talk to him for a second, to laugh about this together.
But as the woods raced past his window, a blur of brown and white and green, Mercer’s mouth was a terrible slash of anger and fear. He was turning the truck frequently, recklessly, and seemed to be rising through the mountains. Mae worried about the ability of the participants to catch up to him, but knew they had the SeeChange camera, which was offering a view so clear and cinematic that it was wildly entertaining. He looked like his hero, Steve McQueen, furious but controlled while operating his heaving truck. Mae briefly had the thought of some kind of streaming show they could create, where people simply broadcast themselves driving through interesting landscapes at high velocity. Drive, She Said, they could call it. Mae’s reverie was interrupted by Mercer’s voice, filled with venom: “f*ck!” he yelled. “f*ck you!”
He was looking at the camera. He’d found it. And then the camera’s view was descending. He was rolling down the window. Mae wondered if it would hold, if its adhesive would trump the strength of the automatic window, but the answer arrived in seconds, as the camera was shaved off the window, its eye swinging wildly as it descended and fell, showing woods, then pavement, then, as it settled on the road, sky.
The clock read 11:51.
For a long few minutes, there were no views of Mercer at all. Mae assumed that at any moment, one of the cars in pursuit would find him, but the views from all four cars showed no sign of him at all. They were all on different roads, and their audio made clear they had no idea where he was.
“Okay,” Mae said, knowing she was about to wow the audience. “Release the drones!” she roared in a voice meant to invoke and mock some witchy villain.
It took agonizingly long—three minutes or so—but soon all the available private drones in the area, eleven of them, were in the air, each operated by its owner, and all were on the mountain where, it had been surmised, Mercer was driving. Their own GPS systems kept them from colliding, and, coordinating with the satellite view, they found his powder-blue truck in sixty-seven seconds. The clock was at 15:04.
The drones’ camera views were now brought onscreen, giving the audience an incredible grid of images, all of the drones well-spaced, providing a kaleidoscopic look at the truck racing up the mountain road through heavy pines. A few of the smaller drones were able to swoop down and get close, while most of them, too large to weave between the trees, followed from above. One of the smaller drones, called ReconMan10, had dropped through the tree canopy and seemed to attach itself to Mercer’s driver-side window. The view was steady and clear. Mercer turned to it, realizing its presence and tenacity, and a look of unmitigated horror transformed his face. Mae had never seen him look like this before.
“Can someone get me on audio for the drone called ReconMan10?” Mae asked. She knew his window was still open. If she spoke through the drone’s speaker, he’d hear her, know it was her. She received the signal that the audio was activated.
“Mercer. It’s me, Mae! Can you hear me?”
There was some faint sign of recognition on his face. He squinted, and looked toward the drone again, disbelieving.
“Mercer. Stop driving. It’s just me. Mae.” And then, almost laughing, she said, “I just wanted to say hi.”
The audience roared.
Mae was warmed by the laughter in the room, and expected that Mercer would laugh, too, and would stop, and would shake his head, in admiration for the wonderful power of the tools at her disposal. What she wanted him to say was, “Okay, you got me. I surrender. You win.”
But he wasn’t smiling, and he wasn’t stopping. He wasn’t even looking at the drone anymore. It was as if he’d decided on a new path, and was locked into it.
“Mercer!” she said, in mock-authoritative voice. “Mercer, stop the car and surrender. You’re surrounded.” Then she thought of something that made her smile again. “You’re surrounded…” she said, lowering her voice, and then, in a chirpy alto, “by friends!” As she’d known they would, a burst of laughter and cheers thundered through the auditorium.
But still he didn’t stop. He hadn’t looked at the drone in minutes. Mae checked the clock: 19 minutes, 57 seconds. She couldn’t decide whether or not it mattered if he stopped, or acknowledged the cameras. He’d been found, after all, hadn’t he? They’d probably beaten the Fiona Highbridge record when they’d caught him running to his car. That was the moment they’d verified his corporeal identity. Mae had the brief thought that they should call off the drones, and shut down the cameras, because Mercer was in one of his moods, and wouldn’t be cooperating—and anyway, she’d proven what she intended to prove.
But something about his inability to give in, to admit defeat, or to at least acknowledge the incredible power of the technology at Mae’s command…she knew she couldn’t give up until she had received some sense of his acquiescence. What would that be, though? She didn’t know, but she knew she’d know it when she saw it.
And then the landscape passing beside the car opened up. It was no longer woods, dense and moving quickly. Now there was all blue, and treetops, and bright white clouds.
She looked to another camera-view, and saw the view from an overhead drone. Mercer was driving on a bridge, a narrow bridge connecting the mountain to another, the span rising hundreds of feet over a gorge.
“Can we turn the microphone up at all?” she asked.
An icon appeared, indicating that the volume had been at half-power, and was now at full.
“Mercer!” she said, using a voice as ominous as she could muster. His head jerked toward the drone, shocked by the volume. Maybe he hadn’t heard her before?
“Mercer! It’s me, Mae!” she said, now holding out hope that he hadn’t known, until then, that it was her that was behind all this. But he didn’t smile. He only shook his head, slowly, as if in disappointment most profound.
Now she could see another two drones on the passenger-side window. A new voice, male, boomed from one of them: “Mercer, you motherf*cker! Stop driving, you f*cking asshole!”
Mercer’s head swung to this voice, and when he turned back to the road, his face showed real panic.
On the screen behind her, Mae saw that two SeeChange cameras, positioned on the bridge, had been added to the grid. A third came alive seconds later, offering a view of the span from the riverbank far below.
Now another voice, this one a woman’s and laughing, boomed from the third drone: “Mercer, submit to us! Submit to our will! Be our friend!”
Mercer turned his truck toward the drone, as if intending to ram it, but it adjusted its trajectory automatically and mimicked his movement, staying directly in sync. “You can’t escape, Mercer!” the woman’s voice bellowed. “Never, ever, ever. It’s over. Now give up. Be our friend!” This last entreaty was rendered in a child’s whine, and the woman transmitting through the electronic speaker laughed at its strangeness, this nasal entreaty emanating from a dull black drone.
The audience was cheering, and the comments were piling up, a number of watchers saying this was the greatest viewing experience of their lives.
And while the cheers were growing louder, Mae saw something come over Mercer’s face, something like determination, something like serenity. His right arm spun the steering wheel, and he disappeared from the view of drones, temporarily at least, and when they regained their lock on him, his truck was crossing the highway, speeding toward its concrete barrier, so fast that it was impossible that it could hold him back. The truck broke through and leapt into the gorge, and, for a brief moment, seemed to fly, the mountains visible for miles beyond. And then the truck dropped from view.
Mae’s eyes turned, instinctively, to the camera on the riverbed, and she saw, clearly, a tiny object dropping from the bridge overhead and landing, like a tin toy, on the rocks below. Though she knew this object was Mercer’s truck, and she knew, in some recess of her mind, that there could be no survivors of such a fall, she looked back to the other cameras, to the views from the drones still hovering above, expecting to see Mercer on the bridge, looking down at the truck below. But there was no one on the bridge.
“You doing okay today?” Bailey asked.
They were in his library, alone but for her watchers. Since Mercer’s death, now a full week ago, the numbers had remained steady, near twenty-eight million.
“I am, thanks,” Mae said, measuring her words, imagining the way the president, no matter the situation, has to find a medium between raw emotion, and quiet dignity, practiced composure. She’d been thinking of herself as a president. She shared much with them—the responsibility to so many, the power to influence global events. And with her position came new, president-level crises. There was Mercer’s passing. There was Annie’s collapse. She thought of the Kennedys. “I’m not sure it’s hit me yet,” she said.
“And it might not, not for a while,” Bailey said. “Grief doesn’t arrive on schedule, as much as we’d like it to. But I don’t want you to be blaming yourself. You’re not doing that, I hope.”
“Well, it’s sort of hard not to,” Mae said, and then winced. Those words were not presidential, and Bailey leapt on them.
“Mae, you were trying to help a very disturbed, antisocial young man. You and the other participants were reaching out, trying to bring him into the embrace of humanity, and he rejected that. I think it’s self-evident that you were, if anything, his only hope.”
“Thank you for saying so,” she said.
“It’s like you were a doctor, coming to help a sick patient, and the patient, upon seeing this doctor, jumps out of the window. You can hardly be blamed.”
“Thank you,” Mae said.
“And your parents? They’re okay?”
“They’re fine. Thank you.”
“It must have been good to see them at the service.”
“It was,” Mae said, though they’d barely spoken then, and hadn’t spoken since.
“I know there’s still some distance between you all, but it will collapse with time. Distance always collapses.”
Mae felt thankful for Bailey, for his strength and his calm. He was, at that moment, her best friend, and something like a father, too. She loved her own parents, but they were not wise like this, not strong like this. She was thankful for Bailey, and Stenton, and especially for Francis, who had been with her most of every day since.
“It frustrates me to see something like that happen,” Bailey continued. “It’s exasperating, really. I know this is tangential, and I know it’s a pet issue of mine, but really: there’d be no chance of that happening if Mercer was in a self-driving vehicle. Their programming would have precluded this. Vehicles like the one he was driving should frankly be illegal.”
“Right,” Mae said. “That stupid truck.”
“And not that it’s about money, but do you know how much it’ll cost to repair that bridge? And what it already cost to clean up the whole mess down below? You put him in a self-driving car, and there’s no option for self-destruction. The car would have shut down. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t get on my soapbox about something so unrelated to your grief.”
“It’s okay.”
“And there he was, alone in some cabin. Of course he’s going to get depressed, and work himself into a state of madness and paranoia. When the participants arrived, I mean, that guy was far past gone. He’s up there, alone, unreachable by the thousands, millions even, who would have helped in any way they could if they’d known.”
Mae looked up to Bailey’s stained-glass ceiling—all those angels—thinking how much Mercer would like to be considered a martyr. “So many people loved him,” she said.
“So many people. Have you seen the comments and tributes? People wanted to help. They tried to help. You did. And certainly there would have been thousands more, if he’d let them. If you reject humanity, if you reject all the tools available to you, all the help available to you, then bad things will happen. You reject the technology that prevents cars from going over cliffs, and you’ll go over a cliff—physically. You reject the help and love of the world’s compassionate billions, and you go over a cliff—emotionally. Right?” Bailey paused, as if to allow the two of them to soak in the apt and tidy metaphor he’d conjured. “You reject the groups, the people, the listeners out there who want to connect, to empathize and embrace, and disaster is imminent. Mae, this was clearly a deeply depressed and isolated young man who was not able to survive in a world like this, a world moving toward communion and unity. I wish I’d known him. I feel like I did, a little bit, having watched the events of that day. But still.”
Bailey made a sound of deep frustration, a guttural sigh.
“You know, a few years ago, I had the idea that I would endeavor, in my lifetime, to know every person on Earth. Every person, even if just a little bit. To shake their hand or say hello. And when I had this inspiration, I really thought I could do it. Can you feel the appeal of a notion like that?”
“Absolutely,” Mae said.
“But there are seven-odd billion people on the planet! So I did the calculations. The best I could come up with was this: if I spent three seconds with each person, that’s twenty people a minute. Twelve hundred an hour! Pretty good, right? But even at that pace, after a year, I would have known only 10,512,000 people. It would take me 665 years to meet everyone at that pace! Depressing, right?”
“It is,” Mae said. She had done a similar calculation herself. Was it enough, she thought, to be seen by some fraction of those people? That counted for something.
“So we have to content ourselves with the people we do know and can know,” Bailey said, sighing loudly again. “And content ourselves with knowing just how many people there are. There are so many, and we have many to choose from. In your troubled Mercer, we’ve lost one of the world’s many, many people, which reminds us of both life’s preciousness and its abundance. Am I right?”
“You are.”
Mae’s thoughts had followed the same path. After Mercer’s death, after Annie’s collapse, when Mae felt so alone, she felt the tear opening up in her again, larger and blacker than ever before. But then watchers from all over the world had reached out, sending her their support, their smiles—she’d gotten millions, tens of millions—she knew what the tear was and how to sew it closed. The tear was not knowing. Not knowing who would love her and for how long. The tear was the madness of not knowing—not knowing who Kalden was, not knowing Mercer’s mind, Annie’s mind, her plans. Mercer would have been saveable—would have been saved—if he’d made his mind known, if he’d let Mae, and the rest of the world, in. It was not knowing that was the seed of madness, loneliness, suspicion, fear. But there were ways to solve all this. Clarity had made her knowable to the world, and had made her better, had brought her close, she hoped, to perfection. Now the world would follow. Full transparency would bring full access, and there would be no more not-knowing. Mae smiled, thinking about how simple it all was, how pure. Bailey shared her smile.
“Now,” he said, “speaking of people we care about and don’t want to lose, I know you visited Annie yesterday. How’s she doing? Her condition the same?”
“It’s the same. You know Annie. She’s strong.”
“She is strong. And she’s so important to us here. Just as you are. We’ll be with you, and with Annie, always. I know you both know that, but I want to say it again. You’ll never be without the Circle. Okay?”
Mae was trying not to cry. “Okay.”
“Okay then.” Bailey smiled. “Now we should go. Stenton awaits, and I think we could all,” and here he indicated Mae and her watchers, “use some distraction. You ready?”
As they walked down the dark hallway toward the new aquarium, radiating a living blue, Mae could see the new caretaker climbing a ladder. Stenton had hired another marine biologist, after he’d had philosophical differences with Georgia. She’d objected to Stenton’s experimental feedings and had refused to do what her replacement, a tall man with a shaved head, was about to do, which was to combine all of Stenton’s Marianas creatures into one tank, to create something closer to the real environment in which he’d found them. It seemed like an idea so logical that Mae was glad that Georgia had been dismissed and replaced. Who wouldn’t want all the animals in their near-native habitat? Georgia had been timid and lacked vision, and such a person had little place near these tanks, near Stenton or in the Circle.
“There he is,” Bailey said as they approached the tank. Stenton stepped into view and Bailey shook his hand, and then Stenton turned to Mae.
“Mae, so good to see you again,” he said, taking both her hands in his. He was in an ebullient mood, but his mouth frowned, briefly, in deference to Mae’s recent loss. She smiled shyly, then raised her eyes. She wanted him to know that she was fine, she was ready. He nodded, stepped back and turned to the tank. For the occasion, Stenton had built a far larger tank, and filled it with a gorgeous array of live coral and seaweed, the colors symphonic under the bright aquarium light. There were lavender anemones, and bubble corals in green and yellow, the strange white spheres of sea sponges. The water was calm but a slight current swayed the violet vegetation, pinched between nooks of the honeycomb coral.
“Beautiful. Just beautiful,” Bailey said.
Bailey and Stenton and Mae stood, her camera trained on the tank, allowing her watchers a deep look into the rich underwater tableau.
“And soon it will be complete,” Stenton said.
At that moment, Mae felt a presence near her, a hot breath on the back of her neck, passing left to right.
“Oh, there he is,” Bailey said. “I don’t think you’ve met Ty yet, have you, Mae?”
She turned to find Kalden, standing with Bailey and Stenton, smiling at her, holding out his hand. He was wearing a wool cap and an oversized hoodie. But it was unmistakably Kalden. Before she could suppress it, she’d let out a gasp.
He smiled, and she knew, immediately, that it would seem natural to her watchers, and to the Wise Men, that she would gasp in the presence of Ty. She looked down and realized she was already shaking his hand. She couldn’t breathe.
She looked up to see Bailey and Stenton grinning. They assumed she was in thrall of the creator of all this, the mysterious young man behind the Circle. She looked back to Kalden, looking for some explanation, but his smile didn’t change. His eyes remained perfectly opaque.
“So good to meet you, Mae,” he said. He said it shyly, almost mumbling, but he knew what he was doing. He knew what the audience expected from Ty.
“Good to meet you, too,” Mae said.
Now her brain splintered. What the f*ck was happening? She scanned his face again, seeing, under his wool cap, a few of his gray hairs. Only she knew they existed. Actually, did Bailey and Stenton know that he’d aged so dramatically? That he was masquerading as someone else, as a nobody named Kalden? It occurred to her that they had to know. Of course they did. That’s why he appeared on video feeds—probably pre-taped long ago. They were perpetuating all of this, helping him disappear.
She was still holding his hand. She pulled away.
“It should have happened sooner,” he said. “I apologize for that.” And now he spoke into Mae’s lens, giving a perfectly natural performance for the watchers. “I’ve been working on some new projects, lots of very cool things, so I’ve been less social than I should have been.”
Instantly Mae’s watcher numbers rose, from just over thirty million to thirty-two, and climbing quickly.
“Been a while since all three of us were in one place!” Bailey said. Mae’s heart was frantic. She’d been sleeping with Ty. What did that mean? And Ty, not Kalden, was warning her about Completion? How was that possible? What did that mean?
“What are we about to see?” Kalden asked, nodding to the water. “I think I know, but I’m anxious to see it happen.”
“Okay,” Bailey said, clapping his hands and wringing them in anticipation. He turned to Mae, and Mae turned her lens to him. “Because he’d get too technical, my friend Stenton here has asked me to explain. As you all know, he brought back some incredible creatures from the unmapped depths of the Marianas Trench. You all have seen some of them, in particular the octopus, and the seahorse and his progeny, and most dramatically, the shark.”
Word was getting out that the Three Wise Men were together and on camera, and Mae’s watchers hit forty million. She turned to the three men, and saw, on her wrist, she’d captured a dramatic picture of their three profiles as they all looked to the glass, their faces bathed in blue light, their eyes reflecting the irrational life within. Her watchers, she noticed, were at fifty-one million. She caught the eye of Stenton, who, with an almost imperceptible tilt of his head, made clear that Mae should turn her lens back to the aquarium. She did, her eyes straining to catch Kalden in some acknowledgement. He stared into the water, giving away nothing. Bailey continued.
“Until now, our three stars have been kept in separate tanks as they’ve acclimated to their lives here at the Circle. But this has been an artificial separation, of course. They belong together, as they were in the sea where they were found. So we’re about to see the three reunited here, so they can co-exist and create a more natural picture of life in the deep.”
On the other side of the tank, Mae could now see the caretaker climbing the red ladder, holding a large plastic bag, heavy with water and tiny passengers. Mae was trying to slow her breathing but couldn’t. She felt like she’d throw up. She thought about running off, somewhere very far away. Run with Annie. Where was Annie?
She saw Stenton staring at her, his eyes concerned, and also stern, telling her to get herself together. She tried to breathe, tried to concentrate on the proceedings. She would have time after all this, she told herself, to untangle this chaos of Kalden and Ty. She would have time. Her heart slowed.
“Victor,” Bailey said, “as you might be able to see, is carrying our most delicate cargo, the seahorse, and of course his many progeny. As you’ll notice, the seahorses are being brought into the new tank in a baggie, much as you would bring home a goldfish from the county fair. This has proven to be the best way to transfer delicate creatures like this. There are no hard surfaces to bump against, and the plastic is far lighter than lucite or any hard surface would be.”
The caretaker was now at the top of the ladder, and, after a quick visual confirmation from Stenton, carefully lowered the bag into the water, so it rested on the surface. The seahorses, passive as always, were reclining near the bottom of the bag, showing no sign that they knew anything—that they were in a bag, that they were being transferred, that they were alive. They barely moved, and offered no protestation.
Mae checked her counter. The watchers were at sixty-two million. Bailey indicated that they would wait a few moments till the water temperatures of the bag and the tank might be aligned, and Mae took the opportunity to turn back to Kalden. She tried to catch his eye, but he chose not take his eyes away from the aquarium. He stared into it, smiling benignly at the seahorses, as if looking at his own children.
At the back of the tank, Victor was again climbing the red ladder. “Well, this is very exciting,” Bailey said. “Now we see the octopus being carried up. He needs a bigger container, but not proportionately bigger. He can fit himself into a lunchbox if he wanted to—he has no spine, no bones at all. He is malleable and infinitely adaptable.”
Soon both containers, those housing the octopus and the seahorses, were bobbing gently on the neon surface. The octopus seemed aware, to some degree, that there was a far bigger home beneath him, and was pressing itself against the base of his temporary home.
Mae saw Victor point to the seahorses and give a quick nod to Bailey and Stenton. “Okay,” Bailey said. “It looks like it’s time to release our seahorse friends into their new habitat. Now I expect this to be quite beautiful. Go ahead, Victor, when you’re ready.” And when Victor released them, it was quite beautiful. The seahorses, translucent but tinted just so, as if gilded only slightly, fell into the tank, drifting down like a slow rain of golden question marks.
“Wow,” Bailey said. “Look at that.”
And finally the father of them all, looking tentative, fell from the bag and into the tank. Unlike his children, who were spread out, directionless, he maneuvered himself, determinedly, down to the bottom of the tank and quickly hid himself amid the coral and vegetation. In seconds he was invisible.
“Wow,” Bailey said. “That is one shy fish.”
The babies, though, continued to float downward, and to swim in the middle of the tank, few of them anxious to go anywhere in particular.
“We’re ready?” Bailey asked, looking up to Victor. “Well this is moving right along! It seems we’re ready for the octopus now.” Victor opened the bottom of the bag, splitting it, and the octopus instantly spread itself up like a welcoming hand. As it had done when alone, it traced the contours of the glass, feeling the coral, the seaweed, always gentle, wanting to know all, touch all.
“Look at that. Ravishing,” Bailey said. “What a stunning creature. He must have something like a brain in that giant balloon of his, right?” And here Bailey turned to Stenton, asking for an answer, but Stenton chose to consider the question rhetorical. The slightest smile overtook the corner of his mouth, but he did not turn away from the scene before him.
The octopus flowered and grew, and flew from one side of the tank to the other, barely touching the seahorses or any other living thing, only looking at them, only wanting to know them, and as he touched and measured everything within the tank, Mae saw movement again on the red ladder.
“Now we have Victor and his helper bringing the real attraction,” Bailey said, watching the first caretaker, now joined by a second, also in white, who was manning some kind of forklift. The cargo was a large lucite box, and inside its temporary home, the shark thrashed a few times, its tail whipping left and right, but was far calmer than Mae had seen it before.
From the top of the ladder, Victor arranged the lucite box on the surface of the water, and when Mae expected the octopus and seahorses to flee for cover, the shark went absolutely still.
“Well, look at that,” Bailey marveled.
The watchers spiked again, now to seventy-five million, and climbed frenetically, half a million every few seconds.
Below, the octopus seemed oblivious to the shark and the possibility of it joining them in the aquarium. The shark was utterly frozen in place, perhaps negating the tank’s occupants’ ability to sense him. Meanwhile, Victor and his assistant had descended the ladder and Victor was returning with a large bucket.
“As you can see now,” Bailey said, “the first thing Victor is doing is dropping some of our shark’s favorite food into the tank. This will keep him distracted and satisfied, and allow his new neighbors to get acclimated. Victor has been feeding the shark all day, so it should be well-satisfied already. But these tuna will serve as breakfast, lunch and dinner, in case he’s still hungry.”
And so Victor dropped six large tuna, each ten pounds or more, into the tank, where they quickly explored their environs. “There’s less need to slowly acclimate these guys to the tank,” Bailey said. “They’ll be food pretty soon, so their happiness is less important than the shark’s. Ah, look at them go.” The tuna were shooting across the tank in diagonals, and their sudden presence chased the octopus and seahorse into the coral and fronds at the bottom of the aquarium. Soon though, the tuna became less frantic, and settled into an easy commute around the tank. At the bottom, the father seahorse was still invisible, but his many children could be seen, their tails wrapped around fronds and the tentacles of various anemones. It was a peaceful scene, and Mae found herself temporarily lost in it.
“Well, this is plain gorgeous,” Bailey said, surveying the coral and vegetation in lemons and blues and burgundies. “Look at these happy creatures. A peaceable kingdom. Seems almost a shame to change it in any way,” he said. Mae glanced quickly to Bailey, and he seemed startled at what he’d said, knowing it was not in the spirit of the present endeavor. He and Stenton exchanged quick looks, and Bailey tried to recover.
“But we’re striving here for a realistic and holistic look at this world,” he said. “And that means including all of the inhabitants of this ecosystem. So I’m getting an indication from Victor that it’s time to invite the shark to join.”
Mae looked up to see Victor struggling to open the container’s bottom hatch. The shark was still holding still, a marvel of self-control. And then he began to slide down the lucite ramp. As he did, for a moment Mae was conflicted. She knew this was the natural thing to happen, his joining the rest of those with whom he shared his environment. She knew that it was right and inevitable. But for a moment, she thought it natural in a way seeing a plane fall from the sky can seem natural, too. The horror comes later.
“Now, for the last piece of this underwater family,” Bailey said. “When the shark is released, we’ll get, for the first time in history, a real look at how life at the bottom of the trench really looks, and how creatures like this cohabitate. Are we ready?” Bailey looked to Stenton, who was standing silently next to him. Stenton nodded brusquely, as if looking to him for the go-ahead was unnecessary.
Victor released the shark, and, as if it had been eyeing its prey through the plastic, mentally preparing its meal and knowing the precise location of each portion, the shark darted downward and quickly snatched the largest tuna and devoured it in two snaps of its jaws. As the tuna was making its way, visibly, through the shark’s digestive tract, the shark ate two more in rapid succession. A fourth was still in the shark’s jaws when the granular remains of the first were being deposited, like snow, onto the aquarium floor.
Mae looked then to the bottom of the tank and saw that the octopus and the seahorse progeny were no longer visible. She saw some sign of movement in the holes in the coral, and caught sight of what she thought was a tentacle. Though Mae seemed sure that the shark couldn’t be their predator—after all, Stenton had found them all in close proximity—they were hiding from it as if they knew it, and its plans, quite well. Mae looked up and saw the shark circling the tank, which was now otherwise empty. In the few seconds that Mae had been looking for the octopus and seahorses, the shark had disposed of the other two fish. Their remains fell like dust.
Bailey laughed nervously. “Well, now I’m wondering—” he said, but stopped. Mae looked up and saw that Stenton’s eyes were narrow and offered no alternative. The process would not be interrupted. She looked to Kalden, or Ty, whose eyes hadn’t left the tank. He was watching the proceedings placidly, as if he had seen it before and knew every outcome.
“Okay,” Bailey said. “Our shark is a very hungry fellow, and I would be worried about the other occupants of our little world here if I didn’t know better. But I do know better. I’m standing next to one of the great underwater explorers, a man who knows what he’s doing.” Mae watched Bailey speak. He was looking at Stenton, his eyes looking for any give, any sign that he might call this off, or offer some explanation or assurance. But Stenton was staring at the shark, admiring.
Quick and savage movement brought Mae’s eyes back to the tank. The shark’s nose was deep in the coral now, attacking it with a brutal force.
“Oh no,” Bailey said.
The coral soon split open and the shark plunged in, coming away, instantaneously, with the octopus, which it dragged into the open area of the tank, as if to give everyone—Mae and her watchers and the Wise Men—a better view as it tore the animal apart.
“Oh god,” Bailey said, quieter now.
Intentionally or not, the octopus presented a challenge to its fate. The shark ripped off an arm, then seemed to get a mouthful of the octopus’s head, only to find, seconds later, that the octopus was still alive and largely intact, behind him. But not for long.
“Oh no. Oh no,” Bailey whispered.
The shark turned and, in a flurry, ripped its prey’s tentacles off, one by one, until the octopus was dead, a shredded mass of milky white matter. The shark took the rest of it in two snatches of its mouth, and the octopus was no more.
A kind of whimper came from Bailey, and without turning her shoulders, Mae looked over to find that Bailey was now turned away, his palms against his eyes. Stenton, though, was looking at the shark with a mixture of fascination and pride, like a parent watching, for the first time, his child doing something particularly impressive, something he’d hoped for and expected but that came delightfully sooner.
Above the tank, Victor looked tentative, and was trying to catch Stenton’s eye. He seemed to be wondering what Mae was wondering, which was whether they should somehow separate the shark from the seahorse, before the seahorse, too, was consumed. But when Mae turned to him, Stenton was still watching, with no change of expression.
In a few more seconds, in a series of urgent thrusts, the shark had broken another coral arch and extracted the seahorse, which had no defenses and was eaten in two bites, first its delicate head, then its curved, papier-mâché torso and tail.
Then, like a machine going about its work, the shark circled and stabbed until he had devoured the thousand babies, and the seaweed, and the coral, and the anemones. It ate everything, and deposited the remains quickly, carpeting the empty aquarium in a low film of white ash.
“Well,” Ty said, “that was about what I imagined would happen.” He seemed unshaken, even buoyant as he shook Stenton’s hand, and then Bailey’s, and then, while still holding Bailey’s hand with his right hand, he took Mae’s with his left, as if the three of them were about to dance. Mae felt something in her palm, and quickly closed her fingers around it. Then he pulled away and left.
“I better head out, too,” Bailey said in a whisper. He turned, dazed, and walked down the darkened corridor.
Afterward, when the shark was alone in the tank, and was circling, still ravenous, never stopping, Mae wondered how long she should remain in place, allowing the watchers to watch this. But she decided that as long as Stenton remained, she would, too. And he stayed for a long while. He couldn’t get enough of the shark, its anxious circling.
“Until next time,” Stenton said finally. He nodded to Mae, and then to her watchers, who were now one hundred million, many of them terrified, many more in awe and wanting more of the same.
In the bathroom stall, with the lens trained on the door, Mae brought Ty’s note close to her face, out of view of her watchers. He insisted on seeing her, alone, and provided detailed directions for where they should meet. When she was ready, he’d written, she need only leave the bathroom, and then turn and say, into her live audio, “I’m going back.” It would imply she was returning to the bathroom, for some unnamed hygienic emergency. And at that moment he would kill her feed, and any SeeChange cameras that might see her, for thirty minutes. It would provoke a minor clamor, but it had to be done. Her life, he said, was at stake, and Annie’s, and her parents’. “Everyone and everything,” he’d written, “is teetering on the precipice.”
This would be her last mistake. She knew it was a mistake to meet him, especially off-camera. But something about the shark had unsettled her, had left her susceptible to bad decisions. If only someone could make these decisions for her—somehow eliminate the doubt, the possibility of failure. But she had to know how Ty had pulled all this off, didn’t she? Perhaps all this was some test? It made a certain sense. If she were being groomed for great things, wouldn’t they test her? She knew they would.
So she followed his directions. She left the bathroom, told her watchers she was returning, and when her feed went dead, she followed his directions. She descended as she had with Kalden that one strange night, tracing the path they’d taken when he’d first brought her to the room, far underground, where they housed and ran cool water through Stewart and everything he’d seen. When Mae arrived, she found Kalden, or Ty, waiting for her, his back to the red box. He’d taken off the wool hat, revealing his grey-white hair, but he was still wearing his hoodie, and the combination of the two men, Ty and Kalden, in one figure, repulsed her, and when he began walking toward her, she yelled “No!”
He stopped.
“Stay there,” she said.
“I don’t know anything about you.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you who I was. But I didn’t lie.”
“You told me your name was Kalden! That’s not a lie?”
“Besides that, I never lied.”
“Besides that? Besides lying about your identity?”
“I think you know I have no choice here.”
“What kind of name is Kalden, anyway? You get it off some baby-name site?”
“I did. You like it?”
He smiled an unnerving smile. Mae had the feeling that she shouldn’t be here, that she should leave immediately.
“I think I need to go,” she said, and stepped toward the stairs. “I feel like this is some horrific prank.”
“Mae, think about it. Here’s my license.” He handed her his driver’s license. It showed a clean-shaven, dark-haired man with glasses who looked more or less like what she remembered Ty looked like, the Ty from the video feeds, the old photos, the portrait in oil outside Bailey’s library. The name read Tyson Matthew Gospodinov. “Look at me. No resemblance?” He retreated to the cave-within-a-cave they’d shared and returned with a pair of glasses. “See?” he said. “Now it’s obvious, right?” As if answering Mae’s next question, he said, “I’ve always been a very average-looking guy. You know this. And then I get rid of the glasses, the hoodies. I change my look, the way I move. But most importantly, my hair went grey. And why do you think that happened?”
“I have no idea,” Mae said.
Ty swept his arms around, encompassing everything around them, the vast campus above. “All this. The f*cking shark that eats the world.”
“Do Bailey and Stenton know you’re going around with some other name?” Mae asked.
“Of course. Yes. They expect me to be here. I’m not technically allowed to leave campus. As long as I’m here, they’re happy.”
“Does Annie know?”
“No.”
“So I’m—”
“You’re the third person who knows.”
“And you’re telling me why?”
“Because you have great influence here, and because you have to help. You’re the only one who can slow all this down.”
“Slow what down? The company you created?”
“Mae, I didn’t intend any of this to happen. And it’s moving too fast. This idea of Completion, it’s far beyond what I had in mind when I started all this, and it’s far beyond what’s right. It has to be brought back into some kind of balance.”
“First of all, I don’t agree. Secondly, I can’t help.”
“Mae, the Circle can’t close.”
“What are you talking about? How can you say this now? If you’re Ty, most of this was your idea.”
“No. No. I was trying to make the web more civil. I was trying to make it more elegant. I got rid of anonymity. I combined a thousand disparate elements into one unified system. But I didn’t picture a world where Circle membership was mandatory, where all government and all life was channeled through one network—”
“I’m leaving,” Mae said, and turned. “And I don’t see why you just don’t leave, too. Leave everything. If you don’t believe in all this, then leave. Go to the woods.”
“That didn’t work for Mercer, did it?”
“f*ck you.”
“Sorry. I’m sorry. But he’s why I contacted you now. Don’t you see that’s just one of the consequences of all this? There will be more Mercers. So many more. So many people who don’t want to be found but who will be. So many people who wanted no part of all this. That’s what’s new. There used to be the option of opting out. But now that’s over. Completion is the end. We’re closing the circle around everyone—it’s a totalitarian nightmare.”
“And it’s my fault?”
“No, no. Not at all. But you’re now the ambassador. You’re the face of it. The benign, friendly face of it all. And the closing of the Circle—it’s what you and your friend Francis made possible. Your mandatory Circle account idea, and his chip. TruYouth? It’s sick, Mae. Don’t you see? All the kids get a chip embedded in them, for safety, when they’re infants. And yes, it’ll save lives. But then, what, you think they suddenly remove them when they’re eighteen? No. In the interest of education and safety, everything they’ve done will be recorded, tracked, logged, analyzed—it’s permanent. Then, when they’re old enough to vote, to participate, their membership is mandatory. That’s where the Circle closes. Everyone will be tracked, cradle to grave, with no possibility of escape.”
“You really sound like Mercer now. This kind of paranoia—”
“But I know more than Mercer. Don’t you think if someone like me, someone who invented most of this sh*t, is scared, don’t you think you should be scared, too?”
“No. I think you lost a step.”
“Mae, so many of the things I invented I honestly did for fun, out of some perverse game of whether or not they’d work, whether people would use them. I mean, it was like setting up a guillotine in the public square. You don’t expect a thousand people to line up to put their heads in it.”
“Is that how you see this?”
“No, sorry. That’s a bad comparison. But some of the things we did, I just—I did just to see if anyone would actually use them, would acquiesce. When they did buy in, half the time I couldn’t believe it. And then it was too late. There was Bailey and Stenton and the IPO. And then it was just too fast, and there was enough money to make any dumb idea real. Mae, I want you to imagine where all this is going.”
“I know where it’s going.”
“Mae, close your eyes.”
“No.”
“Mae, please. Close your eyes.”
She closed her eyes.
“I want you to connect these dots and see if you see what I see. Picture this. The Circle has been devouring all competitors for years, correct? It only makes the company stronger. Already, 90 percent of the world’s searches go through the Circle. Without competitors, this will increase. Soon it’ll be nearly 100 percent. Now, you and I both know that if you can control the flow of information, you can control everything. You can control most of what anyone sees and knows. If you want to bury some piece of information, permanently, that’s two seconds’ work. If you want to ruin anyone, that’s five minutes’ work. How can anyone rise up against the Circle if they control all the information and accesss to it? They want everyone to have a Circle account, and they’re well on their way to making it illegal not to. What happens then? What happens when they control all searches, and have full access to all data about every person? When they know every move everyone makes? If all monetary transactions, all health and DNA information, every piece of one’s life, good or bad, when every word uttered flows through one channel?”
“But there are a thousand protections to prevent all of this. It’s just not possible. I mean, governments will make sure—”
“Governments who are transparent? Legislators who owe their reputations to the Circle? Who could be ruined the moment they speak out? What do you think happened to Williamson? Remember her? She threatens the Circle monopoly and, surprise, the feds find incriminating stuff on her computer. You think that’s a coincidence? That’s about the hundredth person Stenton’s done that to. Mae, once the Circle’s complete, that’s it. And you helped complete it. This democracy thing, or Demoxie, whatever it is, good god. Under the guise of having every voice heard, you create mob rule, a filterless society where secrets are crimes. It’s brilliant, Mae. I mean, you are brilliant. You’re what Stenton and Bailey have been hoping for from the start.”
“But Bailey—”
“Bailey believes that life will be better, will be perfect, when everyone has unfettered access to everyone and everything they know. He genuinely believes that the answers to every life question can be found among other people. He truly believes that openness, that complete and uninterrupted access among all humans will help the world. That this is what the world’s been waiting for, the moment when every soul is connected. This is his rapture, Mae! Don’t you see how extreme that view is? His idea is radical, and in another era would have been a fringe notion espoused by an eccentric adjunct professor somewhere: that all information, personal or not, should be known by all. Knowledge is property and no one can own it. Infocommunism. And he’s entitled to that opinion. But paired with ruthless capitalistic ambition—”
“So it’s Stenton?”
“Stenton professionalized our idealism, monetized our utopia. He’s the one who saw the connection between our work and politics, and between politics and control. Public-private leads to private-private, and soon you have the Circle running most or even all government services, with incredible private-sector efficiency and an insatiable appetite. Everyone becomes a citizen of the Circle.”
“And that’s so bad? If everyone has equal access to services, to information, we finally have a chance at equality. No information should cost anything. There should be no barriers to knowing everything, to accessing all—”
“And if everyone’s tracked—”
“Then there’s no crime. No murder, no kidnapping and rape. No kids ever victimized again. No more missing persons. I mean, that alone—”
“But don’t you see what happened to your friend Mercer? He was pursued to the ends of the earth and now he’s gone.”
“But this is just the pivot of history. Have you talked to Bailey about this? I mean, during any major human turning point, there’s upheaval. Some get left behind, some choose to be left behind.”
“So you think everyone should be tracked, should be watched.”
“I think everything and everyone should be seen. And to be seen, we need to be watched. The two go hand in hand.”
“But who wants to be watched all the time?”
“I do. I want to be seen. I want proof I existed.”
“Mae.”
“Most people do. Most people would trade everything they know, everyone they know—they’d trade it all to know they’ve been seen, and acknowledged, that they might even be remembered. We all know we die. We all know the world is too big for us to be significant. So all we have is the hope of being seen, or heard, even for a moment.”
“But Mae. We saw every creature in that tank, didn’t we? We saw them devoured by a beast that turned them to ash. Don’t you see that everything that goes into that tank, with that beast, with this beast, will meet the same fate?”
“So what exactly do you want from me?”
“When you have the maximum amount of viewers, I want you to read this statement.” He handed Mae a piece of paper, on which he’d written, in crude all capitals, a list of assertions under the headline “The Rights of Humans in a Digital Age.” Mae scanned it, catching passages: “We must all have the right to anonymity.” “Not every human activity can be measured.” “The ceaseless pursuit of data to quantify the value of any endeavor is catastrophic to true understanding.” “The barrier between public and private must remain unbreachable.” At the end she found one line, written in red ink: “We must all have the right to disappear.”
“So you want me to read all this to the watchers?”
“Yes,” Kalden said, his eyes wild.
“I have a series of steps that we can take together that can begin to take all this apart. I know everything that’s ever happened here, Mae, and there’s plenty that’s gone on that would convince anyone, no matter how blind, that the Circle needs to be dismantled. I know I can do it. I’m the only one who can do it, but I need your help.”
“And then what?”
“Then you and I go somewhere. I have so many ideas. We’ll vanish. We can hike through Tibet. We can bike through the Mongolian steppe. We can sail around the world in a boat we built ourselves.”
Mae pictured all this. She pictured the Circle being taken apart, sold off amid scandal, thirteen thousand people out of jobs, the campus overtaken, broken up, turned into a college or mall or something worse. And finally she pictured life on a boat with this man, sailing the world, untethered, but when she tried to, she saw, instead, the couple on the barge she’d met months ago on the bay. Out there, alone, living under a tarp, drinking wine from paper cups, naming seals, reminiscing about island fires.
At that moment, Mae knew what she needed to do.
“Kalden, are you sure we’re not being heard?”
“Of course not.”
“Okay, good. Good. I see everything clearly now.”
