The Circle

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 nally 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
ejaculation, 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. E orts
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 nd 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 nd 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 di erent
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 gure 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 gure 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 gure 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 nally 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 nd 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 brie y 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
nd 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 nd video of your parents at
a baseball game in 1974. The hope, in the end, is to ll 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 ll 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 ashed 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 rst 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 rst 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 ngernails 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 o 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 o , 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 stu 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 stu .
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 pu ness 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 ne. 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.
It was 2:02 when she arrived.
“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 o ce. 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 rst 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 rst boon has been that when the
u 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.”
“You keep scaring me.”
“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, ve 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 ne, 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 ve—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?