The Circle (18 page)

“The two of us will be here all day to answer questions and take stumpers. If you
have a stumper just forward it, and it’ll be routed to whichever of us has the lightest
load. If you have a question, same thing. Send it through the channel I showed you
in the orientation, and it’ll go to one of us. Between me and Mae, you’ll be covered.
Everyone feel good?” No one moved or said a word. “Good. I’ll open the chute again
and we’ll go till twelve thirty today. Lunch will be shorter today to account for
the training and all, but we’ll make it up to you on Friday. Everyone ready?” No one
seemed ready. “Go!”

And Jared jumped down, and Mae climbed down, arranged herself again, and was immediately
thirty queries behind. She started on her
first, and within a minute she had a question on her fourth screen, the one for newbies.

Customer wants their entire payment record from last year. Available? And where?

Mae directed the newbie to the right folder, then returned to the query in front of
her. She continued this way, being pulled away from her own work every few minutes
by a newbie question, until twelve thirty, when she saw Jared again, standing again
on a chair.

“Whoa. Whoa,” he said. “That’s lunch. Intense. Intense. Right? But we did it. Our
overall average is at 93, which is normally not so good, but okay considering the
new systems and increased flow. Congratulations. Get some food, some fuel, and see
you at one p.m. Mae, see me when you can.”

He jumped down again, and was at Mae’s desk before she could get to his. His expression
was one of friendly concern.

“You haven’t gone to the clinic.”

“Me?”

“Is that true?”

“I guess so.”

“You were supposed to have gone your first week.”

“Oh.”

“They’re waiting. Can you go today?”

“Sure. Now?”

“No, no. We’re too swamped right now, as you can see. How about at four? I can handle
the last shift. And by the afternoon all of these newbies will be better honed. Did
you have fun so far today?”

“Sure.”

“Stressed?”

“Well, it adds a new layer to things.”

“It does. It does. And there will be more layers, I want to assure you. I know someone
like you would get bored of just the regular Customer Experience stuff, so next week
we’ll hook you up with a different aspect of the job. I think you’ll love it.” He
glanced at his bracelet and saw the time. “Oh crap. You should go eat. I’m literally
taking food out of your mouth. Go. You have twenty-two minutes.”

Mae found a pre-made sandwich in the closest kitchen and ate at her desk. She scrolled
through the third-screen social feed, looking for anything urgent or needing a reply.
She found and responded to thirty-one messages, feeling satisfied that she’d given
careful attention to all those that required it.

The afternoon was a runaway train, with the questions from the newbies constant, contrary
to the assurances of Jared, who was in and out throughout the afternoon, leaving the
room a dozen times, talking on his phone with great intensity. Mae dealt with the
doubled flow and by 3:48 had a personal score of 96; the pod’s average was 94. Not
bad, she thought, considering the addition of twelve new people, and having to help
them, for much of three hours, singlehandedly. When four o’clock came around, she
knew she was expected at the clinic, and hoped Jared had remembered. She stood, found
him looking her way, and he gave her a thumbs-up. She left.

The clinic’s lobby was really not a lobby at all. It looked more like a cafe, with
Circlers talking in pairs, a wall of beautifully arrayed health
foods, and health drinks, and a salad bar featuring vegetables grown on campus, and
a wall-mounted scroll featuring a recipe for paleo soup.

Mae didn’t know who to approach. There were five people in the room, four of them
working on tablets, one fully retinal, standing in the corner. There was nothing like
the standard window through which a medical administrative’s face would have greeted
her.

“Mae?”

She followed the voice to the face of a woman with short black hair, dimples in both
cheeks, smiling at her.

“You ready now?”

Mae was led down a blue hallway and into a room that looked more like a designer kitchen
than an examination room. The dimpled woman left her there, showing her to an overstuffed
chair.

Mae sat in it, then stood, drawn by the cabinets lining the walls. She could see horizontal
lines, as fine as thread, delineating where one drawer ended and the next began, but
there were no knobs or handles. She ran her hand across the surface, barely registering
the hairline gaps. Above the cabinets was a steel strip, and engraved in it were the
words: T
O
H
EAL
W
E
M
UST
K
NOW
. T
O
K
NOW
W
E
M
UST
S
HARE
.

The door opened and Mae startled.

“Hi Mae,” a face said as it floated, gorgeous and smiling, toward her. “I’m Dr. Villalobos.”

Mae shook the doctor’s hand, mouth agape. The woman was too glamorous for this, for
this room, for Mae. She was no more than forty, with a black ponytail and luminous
skin. Elegant reading glasses hung from her neck, briefly followed the line of her
cream-colored jacket, and rested on her ample chest. She was wearing two-inch heels.

“I’m so glad to see you today, Mae.”

Mae didn’t know what to say. She arrived at “Thanks for having me,” and immediately
felt like an idiot.

“No, thank
you
for coming,” the doctor said. “We have everyone come in, usually in their first week,
so we were getting worried about you. Is there any reason you delayed this long?”

“No, no. Just busy.”

Mae scanned the doctor for physical flaws, finally finding a mole on her neck, a single,
tiny hair protruding from it.

“Too busy for your health! Don’t say that.” The doctor had her back turned to Mae,
preparing some kind of drink. She turned and smiled. “So this is really just an introductory
exam, a basic checkup we give to all new staff members here at the Circle, okay? And
first of all, we’re a prevention-emphasis clinic. In the interest of keeping our Circlers
healthy of mind and body, we provide wraparound wellness services. Does that square
with what you’ve been told?”

“It does. I have a friend who’s worked here for a couple years. She says the care
is incredible.”

“Well that’s nice to hear. Who’s your friend?”

“Annie Allerton?”

“Oh, that’s right. That was in your intake. Who doesn’t love Annie? Tell her hello.
But I guess I can do that myself. She’s in my rotation, so I see her every other week.
She told you the checkups are biweekly?”

“So that’s—”

The doctor smiled. “Every two weeks. That’s the wellness component. If you come here
only when there’s a problem, you never get ahead of things. The biweekly checkups
involve diet consultations,
and we monitor any variances in your overall health. This is key for early detection,
for calibrating any meds you might be on, for seeing any problems a few miles away,
as opposed to after they’ve run you over. Sound good?”

Mae thought of her dad, how late they’d realized his symptoms were MS. “It does,”
she said.

“And all the data we generate here is available to you online. Everything we do and
talk about, and of course all your past records. You signed the form when you started
that allowed us to bring in all your other doctors’ information, so finally you’ll
have it all in one place, and it’s accessible to you, to us, and we can make decisions,
see patterns, see potential issues, given our access to the complete picture. You
want to see it?” the doctor asked, and then activated a screen on the wall. Mae’s
entire medical history appeared before her in lists and images and icons. Dr. Villalobos
touched the wallscreen, opening folders and moving images, revealing the results of
every medical visit she’d ever had—back to her first checkup before starting kindergarten.

“How’s that knee?” the doctor asked. She’d found the MRI Mae had done a few years
ago. Mae had opted not to get ACL surgery; her previous insurance didn’t cover it.

“It’s functional,” Mae said.

“Well, if you want to take care of it, let me know. We do that here at the clinic.
It would take an afternoon and of course would be free. The Circle likes its employees
to have operational knees.” The doctor turned from the screen to smile at Mae, practiced
but convincing.

“Piecing together some of the stuff when you were very young was a challenge, but
from here on out, we’ll have near-complete information.
Every two weeks we’ll do blood work, cognitive tests, reflexes, a quick eye exam,
and a rotating retinue of more exotic tests, like MRIs and such.”

Mae couldn’t figure it out. “But how is this affordable for you guys? I mean, the
cost of an MRI alone—”

“Well, prevention is cheap. Especially compared to finding some Stage-4 lump when
we could have found it at Stage 1. And the cost differential is profound. Because
Circlers are generally young and healthy, our health care costs are a fraction of
those at a similar-sized company—one without the same kind of foresight.”

Mae had the feeling, which she was used to by now at the Circle, that they alone were
able to think about—or were simply alone in being able to
enact
—reforms that seemed beyond debate in their necessity and urgency.

“So when was your last checkup?”

“Maybe college?”

“Okay, wow. Let’s start with your vital signs, all the basics. Have you seen one of
these?” The doctor held out a silver bracelet, about three inches wide. Mae had seen
health monitors on Jared and Dan, but theirs were made of rubber, and fit loosely.
This one was thinner and lighter.

“I think so. It measures your heart rate?”

“Right. Most of the longtime Circlers have some version of it, but they’ve been complaining
about it being too loose, like some kind of bangle. So we’ve modified it so it stays
in place. You want to try it on?”

Mae did. The doctor fit it onto her left wrist, and clicked it closed. It was snug.
“It’s warm,” Mae said.

“It’ll feel warm for a few days, then you and the bracelet will get used to each other.
But it has to touch the skin, of course, to measure what we’d like to measure—which
is everything. You did want the full program, right?”

“I think so.”

“In your intake, you said you wanted the complete recommended array of measurements.
Is that still true?”

“It is.”

“Okay. Can you drink this?” The doctor handed Mae the dense green liquid she’d been
preparing. “It’s a smoothie.”

Mae drank it down. It was viscous and cold.

“Okay, you just ingested the sensor that will connect to your wrist monitor. It was
in that glass.” The doctor punched Mae’s shoulder playfully. “I love doing that.”

“I already swallowed it?” Mae said.

“It’s the best way. If I put it in your hand, you’d hem and haw. But the sensor is
so small, and it’s organic of course, so you drink it, you don’t notice, and it’s
over.”

“So the sensor is already in me?”

“It is. And now,” the doctor said, tapping Mae’s wrist monitor, “now it’s active.
It’ll collect data on your heart rate, blood pressure, cholesterol, heat flux, caloric
intake, sleep duration, sleep quality, digestive efficiency, on and on. A nice thing
for the Circlers, especially those like you who might have occasionally stressful
jobs, is that it measures galvanic skin response, which allows you to know when you’re
amped or anxious. When we see non-normative rates of stress in a Circler or a department,
we can make adjustments to workload, for example. It measures the pH level of your
sweat, so you
can tell when you need to hydrate with alkaline water. It detects your posture, so
you know when you need to reposition yourself. Blood and tissue oxygen, your red blood
cell count, and things like step count. As you know, doctors recommend about ten thousand
steps a day, and this will show you how close you’re getting. Actually, let’s have
you walk around the room.”

Mae saw the number 10,000 on her wrist, and with each step she took, it dropped—9999,
9998, 9997.

“We’re asking all newbies to wear these second-gen models, and in a few months we’ll
have all Circlers coordinated. The idea is that with complete information, we can
give better care. Incomplete information creates gaps in our knowledge, and medically
speaking, gaps in our knowledge create mistakes and omissions.”

“I know,” Mae said. “That was the problem in college for me. You self-reported your
health data, and so it was all over the place. Three kids died of meningitis before
they realized how it was spreading.”

Dr. Villalobos’s expression darkened. “You know, that kind of thing is just unnecessary
now. First of all, you can’t expect college kids to self-report. It should all be
done for them, so they can concentrate on their studies. STDs alone, Hep C—imagine
if the data was just there. Then appropriate action could be taken. No guesswork.
Have you heard of that experiment up in Iceland?”

“I think so.” Mae said, but was only half-sure.

“Well, because Iceland has this incredibly homogenous population, most of the residents
have roots many centuries back on the island. Anyone can trace their ancestry very
easily back a thousand years. So they started mapping the genomes of Icelanders, every
single person, and were able to trace all kinds of diseases to their
origins. They’ve gotten so much valuable data from that pool of people. There’s nothing
like a fixed and relatively homogenous group, exposed to the same factors—and a group
you can study over time. The fixed group, the complete information, both were key
in maximizing the takeaway. So the hope is to do something like that here. If we can
track all you newbies, and eventually all 10,000-plus Circlers, we can both see problems
far before they become serious, and we can collect data about the population as a
whole. Most of you newbies are around the same age, and in generally good health,
even the engineers,” she said, smiling at what was evidently a joke she often told.
“So when there are deviations, we’d like to know about them, and see if there are
trends we can learn from. Does that make sense?”