The Circle (11 page)

She was late getting to the Glass Eatery. She looked around, and up, and finally saw
him sitting a few levels above, his feet dangling from a high lucite stool. She waved,
but couldn’t get his attention. She yelled up to him, as discreetly as she could,
to no avail. Then, feeling foolish, she texted him, and watched as he received the
text, looked around the cafeteria, found her, and waved.

She made her way through the line, got a veggie burrito and some kind of new organic
soda, and sat down next to him. He was wearing a wrinkled clean button-down shirt
and carpenter’s pants. His perch
overlooked the outdoor pool, where a group of staffers were approximating a game of
volleyball.

“Not such an athletic group,” he noted.

“No,” Mae agreed. As he watched the chaotic splashing below, she tried to overlay
this face in front of her with the one she remembered from her first night. There
were the same heavy brows, the same prominent nose. But now Francis seemed to have
shrunk. His hands, using a knife and fork to cut his burrito in two, seemed unusually
delicate.

“It’s almost perverse,” he said, “having so much athletic equipment here when there’s
no athletic aptitude at all. It’s like a family of Christian Scientists living next
to a pharmacy.” Now he turned to her. “Thanks for coming. I wondered if I’d see you
again.”

“Yeah, it’s been so busy.”

He pointed to his food. “I had to start already. Sorry about that. To be honest, I
didn’t totally expect you to show up.”

“I’m sorry for being late,” she said.

“No, believe me, I get it. You need to handle the Monday flow. The customers expect
it. Lunch is pretty secondary.”

“I have to say, I’ve felt bad about the end of our conversation that night. Sorry
about Annie.”

“Did you guys actually make out? I tried to find a spot where I could watch from,
but—”

“No.”

“I thought if I climbed a tree—”

“No. No. That’s just Annie. She’s an idiot.”

“She’s an idiot who happens to be in the top one percent of people here. I wish I
was that kind of idiot.”

“You were talking about when you were a kid.”

“God. Can I blame it on the wine?”

“You don’t have to tell me anything.”

Mae felt terrible, already knowing what she did, hoping he would tell her, so she
could take the previous, secondhand, version of his story and write over it with the
version directly from him.

“No, it’s fine,” he said. “I got to meet a lot of interesting adults who were paid
by the government to care for me. It was awesome. What do you have left, ten minutes?”

“I have till one.”

“Good. Eight more minutes then. Eat. I’ll talk. But not about my childhood. You know
enough. I assume Annie filled in the gory stuff. She likes to tell that story.”

And so Mae tried to eat as much as she could as fast as she could, while Francis talked
about a movie he’d seen the night before in the campus theater. Apparently the director
had been there to present it and had answered questions afterward.

“The movie was about a woman who kills her husband and kids, and during the Q&A we
find out this director’s involved in this protracted custody battle with her own ex-husband.
So we were all looking around, thinking, Is this lady working out some issues on-screen,
or …”

Mae laughed, and then, remembering his own horrible childhood, she caught herself.

“It’s fine,” he said, knowing immediately why she’d paused. “I don’t want you to think
you have to tiptoe around me. It’s been a long time, and if I didn’t feel comfortable
in this territory, I wouldn’t be working on ChildTrack.”

“Well, still. I’m sorry. I’m bad at knowing what to say. But so the project is going
well? How close are you to—”

“You’re still so off-balance! I like that,” Francis said.

“You like a woman who’s off-balance.”

“Especially in my presence. I want you on your toes, off-balance, intimidated, handcuffed,
and willing to prostrate yourself at my command.”

Mae wanted to laugh, but found she couldn’t.

Francis was staring at his plate. “Shit. Every time my brain parks the car neatly
in the driveway, my mouth drives through the back of the garage. I’m sorry. I swear
I’m working on this.”

“It’s fine. Tell me about …”

“ChildTrack.” He looked up. “You really want to know?”

“I do.”

“Because once you get me started, it’ll make your Monday deluge look like a tinkle.”

“We have five and a half minutes left.”

“Okay, remember when they tried to do the implants in Denmark?”

Mae shook her head. She had some vague recollection of a terrible child abduction
and murder—

Francis checked his watch, as if knowing that explaining Denmark would steal a minute
from him. He sighed and started in: “So a couple years ago, the government of Denmark
tried a program where they inserted chips in kids’ wrists. It’s easy, takes two seconds,
it’s medically sound, and instantly it works. Every parent knows where their kid is
at all times. They limited it to under-fourteens, and at first, everyone’s fine. The
court challenges are dropped because there
are so few objections, the polling is through the roof. The parents love it. I mean,
love
it. These are kids, and we’d do anything to keep them safe, right?”

Mae nodded, but suddenly remembered that this story ended horribly.

“But then seven kids go missing one day. The cops, the parents, think, Hey, no problem.
We know where the kids are. They follow the chips, but when they get to the chips,
all seven tracking to some parking lot, they find them all in a paper bag, all bloody.
Just the chips.”

“Now I remember.” Mae felt sick.

“They find the bodies a week later, and by then the public is in a panic. Everyone’s
irrational. They think the chips
caused
the kidnapping, the murders, that somehow the chips provoked whoever did this, made
the task more tempting.”

“That was so horrible. That was the end of the chips.”

“Yeah, but the reasoning was illogical. Especially here. We have, what, twelve thousand
abductions a year? How many murders? The problem there was how shallow the chips were
placed. Anyone can just cut it out of someone’s wrist if they wanted to. Too easy.
But the tests we’re doing here—did you meet Sabine?”

“I did.”

“Well, she’s on the team. She won’t tell you that, because she’s doing some related
stuff she can’t talk about. But for this, she figured out a way to put a chip in the
bone. And that makes all the difference.”

“Oh shit. What bone?”

“Doesn’t matter, I don’t think. You’re making a face.”

Mae corrected her face, tried to look neutral.

“Sure, it’s insane. I mean, some people freak out about chips in our heads, our bodies,
but this thing is about as technologically advanced as a walkie-talkie. It doesn’t
do anything but tell you where something is. And they’re everywhere already. Every
other product you buy has one of these chips. You buy a stereo, it has a chip. You
buy a car, it’s got a bunch of chips. Some companies put chips in food packaging,
to make sure it’s fresh when it gets to market. It’s just a simple tracker. And if
you embed it in bone, it stays there, and can’t be seen with the naked eye—not like
the wrist ones.”

Mae put down her burrito. “Really in the bone?”

“Mae, think about a world where there could never again be a significant crime against
a child. None possible. The second a kid’s not where he’s supposed to be, a massive
alert goes off, and the kid can be tracked down immediately.
Everyone
can track her. All authorities know instantly she’s missing, but they know exactly
where she is. They can call the mom and say ‘Hey, she just went to the mall,’ or they
can track down some molester in seconds. The only hope an abductor would have is to
take a kid, run into the woods with her, do something and run off before the world
descends upon him. But he would have about a minute and a half to do it.”

“Or if they could jam the transmission from the chip.”

“Sure, but who has that expertise? How many electronic-genius pedophiles are there?
Very few, I’m guessing. So immediately you take all child abduction, rape, murder,
and you reduce it by 99 percent. And the price is that the kids have a chip in their
ankle. You want a living kid with a chip in his ankle, a kid who you know will grow
up safe, a kid who can again run down to the park, ride his bike to school, all that?”

“You’re about to say
or
.”

“Right, or do you want a dead kid? Or years of worry every time your kid walks to
the bus stop? I mean, we’ve polled parents worldwide, and after they get over the
initial squeamishness, we get an 88 percent approval. Once they get it in their head
that this is possible, we have them yelling at us, ‘Why don’t we already have this?
When’s it coming?’ I mean, this will begin a new golden age for young people. An age
without worry. Shit. Now you’re late. Look.”

He pointed to the clock. 1:02.

Mae ran.

The afternoon was relentless, and her score barely reached 93. By the end of the day,
she was exhausted, and she turned to her second screen to find a message from Dan.
Got a second? Gina from CircleSocial was hoping to grab a few minutes with you
.

She wrote him back:
How about in fifteen? I have a handful of follow-ups to do, and haven’t peed since
noon
. This was the truth. She hadn’t left her chair in three hours, and she also wanted
to see if she could get the score above 93. She was sure this, her low aggregate,
was why Dan wanted her to meet with Gina.

Dan wrote only,
Thank you Mae
, words that she turned over in her mind as she made her way to the bathroom. Was
he thanking her for being available in fifteen minutes, or thanking her, grimly, for
an unwanted level of hygienic intimacy?

Mae was almost at the bathroom door when she saw a man, in skinny green jeans and
a snug long-sleeved shirt, standing in the
hallway, under a tall narrow window, staring at his phone. Bathed in a blue-white
light, he seemed to be waiting for instructions from his screen.

Mae went inside.

When she was finished, she opened the door to find the man in the same place, now
looking out the window.

“You look lost,” Mae said.

“Nah. Just figuring out something before, you know, heading upstairs. You work over
here?”

“I do. I’m new. In CE.”

“CE?”

“Customer Experience.”

“Oh right. We used to just call it Customer Service.”

“So I take it you’re not new?”

“Me? No, no. I’ve been here a little while. Not so much in this building.” He smiled
and looked out the window, and with his face turned away, Mae took him in. His eyes
were dark, his face oval, and his hair was grey, almost white, but he couldn’t have
been older than thirty. He was thin, sinewy, and his skinny jeans and tight long-sleeve
jersey gave his silhouette the quick thick-thin brushstrokes of calligraphy.

He turned back to her, blinking, scoffing at himself and his poor manners. “Sorry.
I’m Kalden.”

“Kalden?”

“It’s Tibetan,” he said. “It means golden something. My parents always wanted to go
to Tibet but never got closer than Hong Kong. And your name?”

“Mae,” she said, and they shook hands. His handshake was sturdy but perfunctory. He’d
been taught how to shake hands, Mae guessed, but had never seen the point.

“So you’re not lost,” Mae said, realizing she was expected back at her desk; she’d
already been late once today.

Kalden sensed it. “Oh. You have to go. Can I walk you there? Just to see where you
work?”

“Um,” Mae said, now feeling very unsettled. “Sure.” If she hadn’t known better, and
couldn’t see the ID cord around his neck, she would have assumed Kalden, with his
pointed but unfocused curiosity, was either someone who’d wandered off the street,
or some kind of corporate spy. But she didn’t know anything. She’d been at the Circle
a week. This could be some sort of test. Or just an eccentric fellow Circler.

Mae led him back to her desk.

“It’s very clean,” he said.

“I know. I just started, remember.”

“And I know some of the Wise Men like the Circle desks very tidy. You ever see those
guys around here?”

“Who? The Wise Men?” Mae scoffed. “Not here. Not yet at least.”

“Yeah, I guess not,” Kalden said and crouched, his head at the level of Mae’s shoulder.
“Can I see what you do?”

“For my work?”

“Yeah. Can I watch? I mean, not if it makes you uncomfortable.”

Mae paused. Everything and everyone else she’d experienced at the Circle hewed to
a logical model, a rhythm, but Kalden was the anomaly. His rhythm was different, atonal
and strange, but not unpleasant.
His face was so open, his eyes liquid, gentle, unassuming, and he spoke so softly
that any possibility of threat seemed remote.

“Sure. I guess,” she said. “It’s not so exciting, though.”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

And so he watched Mae answer requests. When she turned to him after every seemingly
mundane part of her job, the screen danced brightly in his eyes, his face rapt—like
he’d never seen anything more interesting in his life. At other moments, though, he
seemed removed, seeing something she couldn’t. He’d look at the screen but his eyes
were seeing something deep within.

She continued, and he continued to ask occasional questions. “Now who was that?” “How
often does that happen?” “Why did you respond in that way?”

He was close to her, far too close if he was a normal person with everyday ideas of
personal space, but it was abundantly clear he was not this kind of person, a normal
kind of person. As he watched the screen, and sometimes Mae’s fingers on the keyboard,
his chin got ever-closer to her shoulder, his breath light but audible, his smell,
a simple one of soap and banana shampoo, coming to her on the winds of his tiny exhalations.
The whole experience was so odd that Mae laughed nervously every few seconds, not
knowing what else to do. And then it was done. He cleared his throat and stood up.