The Circle

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 ve prime candidates. One was in Bend,
Oregon. Another was in Ban , 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 identi ed 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—di erent enough to throw o 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 nd
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

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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 ed quickly through the
room and up the stairs.
“Follow her!” Mae nally yelled, and Gretchen Karapcek and her camera began pursuit.
Mae worried, momentarily, that this would be some botched e ort, 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
terri ed and de ant. 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 o cers reached Fiona Highbridge
and applied handcu s 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

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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 nd 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 o ered 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.