The Circle

Likely gluten allergy
Definite horse allergy
Mother has nut allergy
No other likely allergies
“Okay. I can click on any one of these listings and nd out more. Let’s try the gluten
one.” Gus clicked on the rst line, revealing a more complex and dense scroll of links and
text blocks. “Now as you can see, LuvLuv has searched everything Mae’s ever posted. It’s
collated this information and analyzed it for relevance. Maybe Mae’s mentioned gluten.
Maybe she’s bought or reviewed gluten-free products. This would indicate she’s likely

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gluten-allergic.”
Mae wanted to leave the auditorium, but knew it would make more of a scene than
staying.
“Now let’s look at the horse one,” Gus said, and clicked on the next listing. “Here we
can make a more de nite assertion, given it’s found three instances of messages posted
that directly say, for example, I’m allergic to horses.”
“So does that help you?” Gus asked.
“It does,” Francis said. “I was about to take her to some stables to eat leavened bread.”
He mugged to the audience. “Now I know!”
The audience laughed, and Gus nodded, as if to say, Aren’t we a pair? “Okay,” Gus
continued, “now notice that the mentions of the horse allergy were way back in 2010,
from Facebook of all places. For all of you who thought it was silly of us to pay what we
did for Facebook’s archives, take heed! Okay, no allergies. But check this out, right
nearby. This is what I had in mind next—food. Did you think you might take her out to
eat, Francis?”
Francis answered gamely. “Yes I did, Gus.” Mae didn’t recognize this man on stage.
Where had Francis gone? She wanted to kill this version of him.
“Okay, this is where things usually get ugly and stupid. There’s nothing worse than the
back and forth: ‘Where do you want to eat?’ ‘Oh, anything’s ne.’ ‘No, really. What’s your
preference?’ ‘Doesn’t matter to me. What’s yours?’ No more of that bull … shite. LuvLuv
breaks it down for you. Any time she’s posted, any time she’s liked or disliked a
restaurant, any time she’s mentioned food—it all gets ranked and sorted and I end up with
a list like this.”
He clicked on the food icon, which revealed a number of subset lists, with rankings of
type of food, names of restaurants, restaurants by city and by neighborhood. The lists
were uncanny in their accuracy. They even featured the place she and Francis had eaten
earlier that week.
“Now I click on the place I like, and if she paid through TruYou, I know what she
ordered last time she ate there. Click here and see the specials for those restaurants on
Friday, when our date will happen. Here’s the average wait for a table that day.
Uncertainty eliminated.”
Gus went on and on throughout the presentation, into Mae’s preferences for lms, for
outdoor spaces to walk on and jog through, to favorite sports, favorite vistas. It was
accurate, most of it, and while Gus and Francis hammed it up onstage, and the audience
grew ever-more impressed with the software, Mae had rst hidden behind her hands,
then sunk to the lowest-possible place in her seat, and nally, when she felt that any
moment she’d be asked to get onstage to con rm the great power of this new tool, she
slipped out of her seat, across the aisle, out the auditorium’s side door and into the at
white light of an overcast afternoon.
“I’m sorry.”
Mae couldn’t look at him.

---

“Mae. Sorry. I don’t understand why you’re so mad.”
She did not want him near her. She was back at her desk, and he’d followed her there,
standing over her like some carrion bird. She didn’t glance at him, because besides
loathing him and nding his face weak and his eyes shifty, besides being sure she’d never
need to see that wretched face again, she had work to do. The afternoon chute had been
opened and the ow was heavy. “We can talk later,” she said to him, but she had no
intention of talking to him again, that day or any day. There was relief in that certainty.
Eventually he left, at least his corporeal self left, but he appeared in minutes, on her
third screen, pleading for forgiveness. He told her he knew he shouldn’t have sprung it on
her, but that Gus had insisted on it being a surprise. He sent forty or fty messages
throughout the afternoon, apologizing, telling her what a big hit she was, how it would
have been even better if she’d gotten onstage, because people were clapping for her. He
assured her that everything that had been onscreen was publicly available, none of it
embarrassing, all of it culled from things she’d posted herself, after all.
And Mae knew all this to be true. She wasn’t angry at the revelation of her allergies. Or
her favorite foods. She had openly o ered this information for many years, and she felt
that o ering her preferences, and reading about others’, was one of the things she loved
about her life online.
So what had so morti ed her during Gus’s presentation? She couldn’t put her nger on
it. Was it only the surprise of it? Was it the pinpoint accuracy of the algorithms? Maybe.
But then again, it wasn’t entirely accurate, so was that the problem? Having a matrix of
preferences presented as your essence, as the whole you? Maybe that was it. It was some
kind of mirror, but it was incomplete, distorted. And if Francis wanted any or all of that
information, why couldn’t he just ask her? Her third screen, though, all afternoon was
filled with congratulatory messages.