The Circle (25 page)

“You do work here, right?” she asked.

“Of course. How else could I get in? Security is pretty good here.
Especially on a day like today, with our luminous guest.” He nodded to the congresswoman,
who was signing her name on someone’s tablet.

“You look like you’re ready to leave,” Mae said.

“Do I?” Kalden said. “No, no. I’m just comfortable back here. I like to sit during
these things. And I guess I like to have the option of fleeing.” He threw his thumb
over his shoulder, indicating the stairs behind him.

“I’m just glad my supervisors saw me here,” Mae said. “That was my first priority.
Do you have to be seen here by a supervisor or anything?”

“Supervisor?” For a moment, Kalden looked at her as if she’d just said something in
a familiar and yet incomprehensible language. “Oh yeah,” he said, nodding. “They saw
me here. I took care of that.”

“Have you told me what you do here yet?”

“Ah, I don’t know. Have I? Look at that guy.”

“What guy?”

“Oh, never mind,” Kalden said, seeming to have already forgotten whom he was looking
at. “So you’re in PR?”

“No. Customer Experience.”

Kalden tilted his head. “Oh. Oh. I knew that,” he said, unconvincingly. “You’ve been
there a while?”

Mae had to laugh. The man was not all there. His mind seemed barely tethered to his
body, much less the earth.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his face turning to her, now looking impossibly sincere and
clear-eyed. “But I
want
to remember these things about you. I was actually hoping I’d see you here.”

“How long have you worked here again?” she asked.

“Me? Um.” He scratched the back of his head. “Wow. I don’t know. A while now.”

“One month? A year? Six years?” she asked, thinking he really was some kind of savant.

“Six?” he said, “That would be the beginning. You think I look old enough to have
been here six years? I don’t want to look that old. Is it the grey hair?”

Mae had no idea what to say. Of course it was the grey hair. “Should we get a refreshment?”
she asked.

“No, you go ahead,” he said.

“Afraid to leave your hideout?”

“No, just feeling less social.”

She made her way to a table where a few hundred glasses of wine had been poured and
were waiting.

“Mae, right?”

She turned to find the two women, Dayna and Hillary, who were building a submersible
for Stenton. Mae remembered meeting them on her first day, and since then had been
getting their updates on her second screen at least three a day. They were weeks away
from finishing the craft; Stenton planned to take it to the Marianas Trench.

“I’ve been following your progress,” Mae said. “Incredible. You’re building it here?”

Mae glanced over her shoulder to make sure Kalden hadn’t made a quick exit.

“With the Project 9 guys, yeah,” Hillary said, waving a hand at some other, unknown
part of the campus. “Safer to build it here, to keep the patented stuff secure.”

“This is the first vessel big enough to really bring back full-sized animal life,”
Dayna said.

“And you guys get to go?”

Dayna and Hillary laughed. “No,” Hillary said. “This thing’s built for one man and
one man only: Tom Stenton.”

Dayna looked askance at Hillary, then back to Mae. “The costs of making it big enough
for more people are pretty much prohibitive.”

“Right,” Hillary said. “That’s what I meant.”

When Mae returned to Kalden’s stairwell, holding two glasses of wine, he was in the
same place, but he had somehow gotten himself two glasses of his own.

“Someone came by with a tray,” he said, standing up.

They stood briefly, each two-fisted, and Mae could think of nothing but clinking all
four glasses together, which they did.

“I ran into the team building the submersible,” Mae said. “You know them?”

Kalden rolled his eyes. It was startling. Mae hadn’t seen anyone else do that at the
Circle.

“What?” Mae said.

“Nothing,” he said. “Did you like the speech?” he asked.

“The whole Santos thing? I did. Very exciting.” She was careful with her words. “I
think this will be a momentous, uh, moment in the history of demo—” She paused, seeing
him smile. “What?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said. “You don’t have to give me a speech. I heard what Stenton said.
You really think this is a good idea?”

“You don’t?”

He shrugged and drained half his glass. “That guy just concerns
me sometimes.” Then, knowing he shouldn’t have said that about one of the Wise Men,
he changed tacks. “He’s just so smart. It’s intimidating. You really think I look
old? What would you say? Thirty?”

“You don’t look that old,” Mae said.

“I don’t believe you. I know I do.”

Mae drank from one of her glasses. They looked around, watching the feed from Santos’s
camera. It was being projected onto the far wall, and a group of Circlers stood, watching,
while Santos mingled a few feet away. One Circler found his own image caught on the
congresswoman’s camera, and positioned his hand to cover his second, projected, face.

Kalden watched closely, his brow furrowed. “Hm,” he said. He tilted his head, like
a traveler puzzling out some odd local customs. Then he turned to Mae, and looked
at her two glasses and at his own, as if just now realizing the humor in both of them
standing two-fisted in a doorway. “I’m gonna get rid of this one,” he said, and downed
the glass in his left hand. Mae followed suit.

“Sorry,” she said, for no reason. She knew she would soon be tipsy, probably too tipsy
to hide it; bad decisions would ensue. She tried to think of something intelligent
to say while she could.

“So where does all that go?” she asked.

“The stuff from the camera?”

“Yeah, is it stored somewhere here? The cloud?”

“Well, it’s in the cloud, sure, but it has to be stored in a physical place, too.
The stuff from Stewart’s camera … Wait. You want to see something?”

He was already halfway down the stairwell, his limbs nimble and spidery.

“I don’t know,” Mae said.

Kalden looked up, as if he’d had his feelings hurt. “I can show you where Stewart
is stored. You want to? I’m not taking you to some dungeon.”

Mae looked around the room, scanning for Dan and Jared, but couldn’t find them. She’d
stayed an hour, and they’d seen her, so she assumed she could leave. She took a few
pictures, posted them, and sent a series of zings, detailing and commenting on the
proceedings. Then she followed Kalden down the stairs, three flights, to what she
assumed was the basement. “I’m really trusting you,” she said.

“You should,” Kalden said, approaching a large blue door. He passed his fingers over
a wall-mounted pad and it opened. “Come.”

She followed him down a long hallway, and she had the feeling she was passing from
one building to another, through some tunnel far underground. Soon another door appeared,
and again Kalden released the lock with his fingerprints. Mae followed, almost giddy,
intrigued by his extraordinary access, too tipsy to measure the wisdom of following
this calligraphic man through this labyrinth. They rode down what Mae guessed was
four floors, exited into another long corridor, and then entered another stairwell,
where they again went down. Mae soon found her second glass of wine cumbersome, so
she finished it.

“Anywhere I can put this?” she asked. Without a word, Kalden took the glass and left
it on the lowest step of the stairway they’d just finished.

Who was this person? He had access to every door he encountered, but he also had an
anarchic streak. No one else at the Circle would abandon a glass like that—which amounted
to some grand act of pollution—and no one else would take such a journey in the middle
of a company party. There was a muffled part of Mae that knew Kalden was likely a
troublemaker here, and that what they were doing was probably against some or all
rules and regulations.

“I still don’t know what you do here,” she said.

They were walking through a dimly lit corridor that sloped gently downward and with
no apparent end.

He turned. “Not much. I go to meetings. I listen, I provide feedback. It’s not very
important,” he said, walking briskly ahead of her.

“Do you know Annie Allerton?”

“Of course. I love Annie.” Now he turned back to her. “Hey, you still have that lemon
I gave you?”

“No. It never turned yellow.”

“Huh,” he said, and his eyes briefly left their focus on her, as if they were needed
somewhere else, somewhere deep in his mind, for a brief but crucial calculation.

“Where are we?” Mae asked. “I feel like we’re a thousand feet underground.”

“Not quite,” he said, his eyes returning. “But close. Have you heard of Project 9?”

Project 9, as far as Mae knew, was the all-encompassing name for the secret research
being done at the Circle. Anything from space technology—Stenton thought the Circle
could design and build a far better reusable spacecraft—to what was rumored to be
a plan to embed and make accessible massive amounts of data in human DNA.

“Is that where we’re going?” Mae asked.

“No,” he said, and opened another door.

They entered a large room, about the size of a basketball court, dimly lit but for
a dozen spotlights trained on an enormous red metallic
box, the size of a bus. Each side was smooth, polished, the whole thing surrounded
by a network of gleaming silver pipes forming an elaborate grid around it.

“It looks like some kind of Donald Judd sculpture,” Mae said.

Kalden turned to her, his face alight. “I’m so glad you said that. He was a big inspiration
to me. I love that thing he once said: ‘Things that exist exist, and everything is
on their side.’ You ever see his stuff in person?”

Mae was only passingly familiar with the work of Donald Judd—they’d done a few days
on him in one of her art history classes—but didn’t want to disappoint Kalden. “No,
but I love him,” she said. “I love his heft.”

And with that, something new appeared on Kalden’s face, some new respect for, or interest
in, Mae, as if at that moment she’d become three-dimensional and permanent.

Then Mae ruined it. “He did this for the company?” she said, nodding at the massive
red box.

Kalden laughed, then looked at her, his interest in her not gone, but certainly in
retreat. “No, no. He’s been dead for decades. This was just inspired by his aesthetic.
This is actually a machine. Or inside it is. It’s a storage unit.”

He looked at Mae, expecting her to complete the thought.

She couldn’t.

“This is Stewart,” he finally said.

Mae knew nothing about data storage, but had been under the general idea that storing
such information could be done in a far smaller space.

“All this for one person?” she asked.

“Well, it’s the storage of the raw data, and then the capacity to run all kinds of
scenarios through it. Every bit of video is being mapped a hundred different ways.
Everything Stewart sees is correlated with the rest of the video we have, and it helps
map the world and everything in it. And of course, what you get through Stewart’s
cameras is exponentially more detailed and layered than any consumer device.”

“And why have it here, as opposed to stored in the cloud or in the desert somewhere?”

“Well, some people like to scatter their ashes and some like to have a plot close
to home, right?”

Mae wasn’t precisely sure what that meant but she didn’t feel she could admit that.
“And the pipes are for electricity?” she asked.

Kalden opened his mouth, paused, then smiled. “No, that’s water. A ton of water’s
needed to keep the processors cool. So the water runs through the system, cooling
the overall apparatus. Millions of gallons every month. You want to see Santos’s room?”

He led her through a door to another, identical, room, with another great red box
dominating the space. “This was supposed to be for someone else, but when Santos stepped
up, it was assigned to her.”

Mae had already said too many silly things that night, and was feeling light-headed,
so she didn’t ask the questions she wanted to ask, such as, How could these things
take up so much space? And use so much water? And if even a hundred more people wanted
to store their every minute—and surely millions would opt to go transparent, would
beg to—how could we do this when each life took up so much space? Where would all
these great red boxes go?

“Oh wait, something’s about to happen,” Kalden said, and he took
her hand and led her back into Stewart’s room, where the two of them stood, listening
to the hum of the machines.

“Has it happened?” Mae asked, thrilling at the feel of his hand, his palm soft and
his fingers warm and long.

Kalden raised his eyebrows, telling her to wait.

A loud rush came from overhead, the unmistakable movement of water. Mae looked up,
briefly thinking they would be drenched, but realized it was only the water coming
through the pipes, heading for Stewart, cooling all he’d done and seen.

“Such a pretty sound, don’t you think?” Kalden said, looking to her, his eyes seeming
to want to get back to the place where Mae was something more than ephemeral.

“Beautiful,” she said. And then, because the wine had her teetering, and because he’d
just held her hand, and because something about the rush of water set her free, she
took Kalden’s face in her hands and kissed his lips.

His hands rose from his sides and held her, tentatively, around the waist, just his
fingertips, as if she were a balloon he didn’t want to pop. But for a terrible moment,
his mouth was inanimate, stunned. Mae thought she’d made a mistake. Then, as if a
bundle of signals and directives had finally reached his cerebral cortex, his lips
awakened and returned the force of her kiss.

“Hold on,” he said after a moment, and pulled away. He nodded toward the red box containing
Stewart, and led her by the hand out of the room and into a narrow corridor she hadn’t
seen before. It was unlit, and as they stepped further, the light from Stewart no
longer penetrated.