The Circle

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?”
“Yes.”
“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 shu ing in the room, some intake of breath, mostly from the older
Circlers.
“Let her nish,” someone, a new voice, said. Mae looked around to nd Stenton near
the door. His armed were crossed, his eyes staring at the oor. He looked, brie y, 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 nd 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 ve 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
uni ed 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 in nitely 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 di erent sites for a hundred di erent
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
de ance. 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 lter, 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, brie y; 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 shit, 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 fties.
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 sco ed 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 rst, 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, nding 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 rst in the Circle, polished there and later rolled out for use in any
nation where Circle membership was strong enough to make it practical.

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