The Circle

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superseded by Just looked up his picture.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 nally 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
terri ed. Her father was sitting on the bed, and her mother was kneeling on the oor, 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 o 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.”

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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 di cult to be o -campus anyway. There were homeless
people, and there were the attendant and assaulting smells, and there were machines that
didn’t work, and oors 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 xed, she
knew, once the gami caton 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 lth, and unnecessary strife and
unnecessary errors and ine ciencies—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
e orts would be appreciated, immediately and demonstrably. She entered the building,
looking brie y 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.