The Circle (27 page)

“Good,” Pete said. “So we’re done. You get back to your desk, and the first bell will
come on. Then you run through as many as you can this afternoon—certainly the first
five hundred. Good?”

“Good.”

“Oh, and when you get back to your desk, you’ll see a new screen. Every so often,
one of the questions will be accompanied by an image if it’s necessary. We keep these
to a minimum, though, because we know you need to concentrate.”

When Mae got back to her desk, a new screen, her fifth, had been set up just to the
right of her newbie-question screen. She had a few minutes before one o’clock, so
she tested the system. The first bell rang, and she nodded. A woman’s voice, sounding
like a newscaster’s, asked her, “For vacations, are you inclined toward one of relaxation,
like a beach or luxury hotel, or are you inclined toward adventure, like a white-water
rafting trip?”

Mae answered “Adventure.”

A tiny bell rang, faint and pleasant.

“Thank you. What sort of adventure?” the voice asked.

“White-water rafting,” Mae answered.

Another tiny bell. Mae nodded.

“Thank you. For white-water rafting, do you prefer a multi-day trip, with overnight
camping, or a day trip?”

Mae looked up to find the room filling with the rest of the pod, returning from lunch.
It was 12:58.

“Multi-day,” she said.

Another bell. Mae nodded.

“Thank you. How does a trip down the Grand Canyon sound?”

“Smile.”

The bell sang faintly. Mae nodded.

“Thank you. Would you be willing to pay 1,200 dollars for a weeklong trip down the
Grand Canyon?” the voice asked.

“Meh,” Mae said, and looked up to see Jared, standing on his chair.

“The chute is open!” he yelled.

Almost immediately twelve customer queries appeared. Mae answered the first, got a
92, followed up, and it rose to 97. She answered the next two, for an average of 96.

“Mae.”

It was a woman’s voice. She looked around, thinking it might be Renata. But there
was no one near her.

“Mae.”

Now she realized it was her own voice, the prompt she’d agreed to. It was louder than
she’d expected, louder than the questions or the bell, and yet it was seductive, thrilling.
She turned the volume down on the headset, and again the voice came: “Mae.”

Now, with it turned down, it wasn’t nearly as intriguing, so she returned the volume
to the previous level.

“Mae.”

It was her voice, she knew, but then somehow it sounded less like her and more like
some older, wiser version of herself. Mae had the thought that if she had an older
sister, an older sister who had seen more than she had, that sister’s voice would
sound like this.

“Mae,” the voice said again.

The voice seemed to lift Mae off her seat and spin her around. Every time she heard
it, her heart sped up.

“Mae.”

“Yes,” she said finally.

But nothing happened. It was not programmed to answer questions. She hadn’t been told
how to respond. She tried nodding. “Thank you, Mae,” her voice said, and the bell
rang.

“Would you be willing to pay 1,200 dollars for a weeklong trip down the Grand Canyon?”
the first voice asked again.

“Yes.”

The bell rang.

It was all easy enough to assimilate. The first day, she’d gotten through 652 of the
survey questions, and congratulatory messages came from Pete Ramirez, Dan and Jared.
Feeling strong and wanting to impress them even more, she answered 820 the next day,
and 991 the day after that. It was not difficult, and the validation felt good. Pete
told her how much the clients were appreciating her input, her candor and her insights.
Her aptitude for the program was making it easier to expand it to others in her pod,
and by the end of the second week, a dozen others in the room were answering survey
questions, too. It took a day or so to get used to, seeing so many people nodding
so frequently—and with varying styles, some with sudden birdlike jerks, others more
fluidly—but soon it was as normal as the rest of their routines, involving typing
and sitting and seeing their work appear on an array of screens. At certain moments,
there was
the happy visual of a herd of heads nodding in what appeared to be unison, as if there
were some common music playing in all of their minds.

The extra layer of the CircleSurveys helped distract Mae from thinking about Kalden,
who had yet to contact her, and who had not once answered his phone. She’d stopped
calling after two days, and had chosen not to mention him at all to Annie or anyone
else. Her thoughts about him followed a similar path as they had after their first
encounter, at the circus. First, she found his unavailability intriguing, even novel.
But after three days, it seemed willful and adolescent. By the fourth day, she was
tired of the game. Anyone who disappeared like that was not a serious person. He wasn’t
serious about her or how she felt. He had seemed supremely sensitive each time they’d
met, but then, when apart, his absence, because it was total—and because total non-communication
in a place like the Circle was so difficult, it felt like violence. Even though Kalden
was the only man for whom she’d ever had real lust, she was finished. She would rather
have someone lesser if that person were available, familiar, locatable.

In the meantime, Mae was improving her CircleSurvey performance. Because their peers’
survey numbers were made available, competition was healthy and kept them all on their
toes. Mae’s average was 1,345 questions each day, second-highest only to a newbie
named Sebastian, who sat in the corner and never left his desk for lunch. Given she
was still getting the newbies’ question-overrun on her fourth screen, Mae felt fine
about being second in this one
category. Especially given her PartiRank had been in the 1,900s all month, and Sebastian
had yet to crack 4,000.

She was trying to push into the 1,800s one Tuesday afternoon, commenting on hundreds
of InnerCircle photos and posts, when she saw a figure in the distance, resting against
the doorjamb at the far end of the room. It was a man, and he was wearing the same
striped shirt Kalden was wearing when she’d last seen him. His arms were crossed,
his head tilted, as if he was seeing something he couldn’t quite understand or believe.
Mae was sure it was Kalden, and forgot to breathe. Before she could conceive of a
less eager reaction, she waved, and he waved back, raising his hand just above his
waist.

“Mae,” the voice said through her headset.

And at that moment, the figure in the doorway spun away and was gone.

“Mae,” the voice said again.

She took off the headphones and jogged to the door where she’d seen him, but he was
gone. She instinctively went to the bathroom where she’d first met him, but he wasn’t
there, either.

When she got back to her desk, there was someone in her chair. It was Francis.

“I’m still sorry,” he said.

She looked at him. His heavy eyebrows, his boat-keel nose, his tentative smile. Mae
sighed and took him in. That smile, she realized, was the smile of someone who was
never sure he’d gotten the joke. Still, Mae had, in recent days, thought of Francis,
the profound contrast he offered to Kalden. Kalden was a ghost, wanting Mae to chase
him, and Francis was so available, so utterly without mystery. In a weak moment or
two, Mae had wondered what she might do the next
time she saw him. Would she succumb to Francis’s ready presence, to the simple fact
that he wanted to be near her? The question had been in her head for days, but only
now did she know the answer. No. He still disgusted her. His meekness. His neediness.
His pleading voice. His thievery.

“Have you deleted the video?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “You know I can’t.” Then he smiled, swiveling in her chair. He thought
they were being friendly. “You had an InnerCircle survey question and I answered it.
I assume you approve of the Circle sending aid to Yemen?”

She pictured, briefly, burying her fist in his face.

“Please leave,” she said.

“Mae. No one’s watched the video. It’s just a part of the archive. It’s one of ten
thousand clips that go up every day here at the Circle alone. One of a billion worldwide,
every day.”

“Well, I don’t want it to be one of the billion.”

“Mae, you know technically neither one of us owns that video anymore. I couldn’t delete
it if I tried. It’s like news. You don’t own the news, even if it happens to you.
You don’t own history. It’s part of the collective record now.”

Mae’s head was about to explode. “I have to work,” she said, managing not to slap
him. “Can you leave?”

Now he seemed, for the first time, to grasp that she really loathed him and did not
want him near. His face twisted into something like a pout. He looked at his shoes.
“You know they approved ChildTrack in Vegas?”

And she felt for him, even if briefly. Francis was a desperate man who’d never had
a childhood, had no doubt tried all his life to please
those around him, the succession of foster parents who had no intention of keeping
him.

“That’s great, Francis,” she said.

The beginnings of a smile lifted his face. Hoping it might pacify him and allow her
to get back to work, she went further. “You’re saving a lot of lives.”

Now he beamed. “You know, in six months it could be all over. It could be everywhere.
Full saturation. Every child trackable, every child safe forever. Stenton told me
this himself. Did you know he visited my lab? He’s taken a personal interest. And
apparently they might change the name to TruYouth. Get it? TruYou, TruYouth?”

“That’s so good, Francis,” Mae said, her body overtaken by a surge of feeling for
him, some mix of empathy and pity and even admiration. “I’ll talk to you later.”

Developments like Francis’s were happening with incredible frequency in those weeks.
There was talk of the Circle, and Stenton in particular, taking over the running of
San Vincenzo. It made sense, given most of the city’s services were funded by, and
had been improved by, the company. There was a rumor that Project 9 engineers had
figured out a way to replace the random jumble of our nighttime dreaming with organized
thinking and real-life problem solving. Another Circle team was close to figuring
out how to disassemble tornadoes as soon as they formed. And then there was everyone’s
favorite project, in the works for months now: the counting of the sands in the Sahara.
Did the world need this? The utility of the project was not immediately clear, but
the Wise Men had a sense of
humor about it. Stenton, who had initiated the endeavor, called it a lark, something
they were doing, first of all, to see if it could be done—though there seemed to be
no doubt, given the easy algorithms involved—and only secondarily for any scientific
benefit. Mae understood it as most Circlers did: as a show of strength, and as a demonstration
that with the will and ingenuity and economic wherewithal of the Circle, no earthly
question would remain unanswered. And so, throughout the fall, with a bit of theatricality—they
dragged out the process longer than necessary, for it only took them three weeks to
count—they finally revealed the number of grains of sand in the Sahara, a number that
was comically large and did not, immediately, mean much to anyone, beyond the acknowledgement
that the Circle did what they said they would do. They got things done, and with spectacular
speed and efficiency.

The main development, and one that Bailey himself zinged about every few hours, was
the rapid proliferation of other elected leaders, in the U.S. and globally, who had
chosen to go clear. It was, to most minds, an inexorable progression. When Santos
had first announced her new clarity, there was media coverage, but not the kind of
explosion anyone at the Circle had hoped for. But then, as people logged on and began
watching, and began realizing that she was deadly serious—that she was allowing viewers
to see and hear precisely what went into her day, unfiltered and uncensored—the viewership
grew exponentially. Santos posted her schedule each day, and by the second week, when
she was meeting with a group of lobbyists wanting to drill in the Alaskan tundra,
there were millions watching her. She was candid with these lobbyists, avoiding anything
like preaching or pandering. She was so frank, asking the questions she would have
asked behind closed doors, that it made for riveting, even inspiring viewing.

By the third week, twenty-one other elected leaders in the U.S. had asked the Circle
for their help in going clear. There was a mayor in Sarasota. A senator from Hawaii,
and, not surprisingly, both senators from California. The entire city council of San
Jose. The city manager of Independence, Kansas. And each time one of them made the
commitment, the Wise Men zinged about it, and there was a hastily arranged press conference,
showing the actual moment when their days went transparent. By the end of the first
month, there were thousands of requests from all over the world. Stenton and Bailey
were astounded, were flattered, were overwhelmed, they said, but were caught flat-footed.
The Circle couldn’t meet all the demand. But they endeavored to do so.

Production on the cameras, which were as yet unavailable to consumers, went into overdrive.
The manufacturing plant, in China’s Guangdong province, added shifts and began construction
on a second factory to quadruple their capacity. Every time a camera was installed
and a new leader had gone transparent, there was another announcement from Stenton,
another celebration, and the viewership grew. By the end of the fifth week, there
were 16,188 elected officials, from Lincoln to Lahore, who had gone completely clear,
and the waiting list was growing.

The pressure on those who hadn’t gone transparent went from polite to oppressive.
The question, from pundits and constituents, was obvious and loud: If you aren’t transparent,
what are you hiding? Though some citizens and commentators objected on grounds of
privacy, asserting that government, at virtually every level, had always
needed to do some things in private for the sake of security and efficiency, the momentum
crushed all such arguments and the progression continued. If you weren’t operating
in the light of day, what were you doing in the shadows?