The Circle (36 page)

Mae checked the time. 1:02. Additional Guidance spoke through her earpiece: “Shark
feeding ready.”

“Okay,” Mae said, glancing at her wrist. “I’m seeing a bunch of requests that we get
back to the shark, and it’s after one, so I’m thinking we’ll do that.” She left the
seahorse, who turned to her, briefly, as if not wanting to see her go.

Mae made her way back to the first and largest aquarium, which held Stenton’s shark.
Above the aquarium, she saw a young woman, with curly black hair and cuffed white
jeans, standing atop a sleek red ladder.

“Hello,” Mae said to her. “I’m Mae.”

The woman seemed ready to say “I know that,” but then, as if remembering they were
on camera, adopted a studied, performative tone. “Hello Mae, I’m Georgia, and I’ll
be feeding Mr. Stenton’s shark now.”

And then, though it was blind, and there was no food yet in the tank, the shark seemed
to sense a feast was at hand. It began turning like a cyclone, rising ever-closer
to the surface. Mae’s watchers had already risen by 42,000.

“
Some
one’s hungry,” Mae said.

The shark, which had seemed only passingly menacing before, now appeared vicious and
wholly sentient, the embodiment of the predatory instinct. Georgia was attempting
to look confident, competent, but Mae saw fear and trepidation in her eyes. “Ready
down
there?” she asked, without taking her eyes off the shark making its way toward her.

“We’re ready,” Mae said.

“Okay, I’m going to feed the shark something new today. As you know, he’s been fed
all kinds of stuff, from salmon to herring to jellyfish. He’s devoured everything
with equal enthusiasm. Yesterday we tried a manta, which we didn’t expect him to enjoy,
but he didn’t hesitate, and ate with gusto. So today we’re again experimenting with
a new food. As you can see,” she said, and Mae noticed that the bucket she carried
was made of lucite, and inside she saw something blue and brown, with too many legs.
She heard it ticking against the bucket walls: a lobster. Mae had never thought of
sharks eating lobsters, but she couldn’t see why they wouldn’t.

“Here we have a regular Maine lobster, which we’re not sure if this shark is equipped
to eat.”

Georgia was perhaps trying to put on a good show, but even Mae was nervous about how
long she was holding the lobster over the water.
Drop it
, Mae thought to herself.
Please drop it
.

But Georgia was holding it over the water, presumably for the benefit of Mae and her
viewers. The shark, meanwhile, had sensed the lobster, had no doubt mapped its shape
with whatever sensors it possessed, and was circling quicker, still obedient but at
the end of its patience.

“Some sharks can process the shells of crustaceans like this, some can’t,” Georgia
said, now dangling the lobster such that its claw was lazily touching the surface.
Drop it, please
, Mae thought.
Please drop it now
.

“So I’ll just drop this little guy into—”

But before she could finish her sentence the shark had risen up and snatched the lobster
from the caretaker’s hand. By the time Georgia let out a squeal and grabbed her fingers,
as if to count them, the shark was already back in the middle of the tank, the lobster
engulfed in its jaws, the crustacean’s white flesh spraying from the shark’s wide
mouth.

“Did he get you?” Mae asked.

Georgia shook her head, holding back tears. “Almost.” She rubbed her hand as if it
had been burned.

The lobster had been consumed, and Mae saw something gruesome and wonderful: the lobster
was being processed, inside the shark, in front of her, with lightning speed and incredible
clarity. Mae saw the lobster broken into dozens, then hundreds of pieces, in the shark’s
mouth, then saw those pieces make their way through the shark’s gullet, its stomach,
its intestines. In minutes the lobster had been reduced to a grainy, particulate substance.
The waste left the shark and fell like snow to the aquarium floor.

“Looks like he’s still hungry,” Georgia said. She was atop the ladder again, but now
with a different lucite container. While Mae had been watching the digestion of the
lobster, Georgia had retrieved a second meal.

“Is that what I think it is?” Mae asked.

“This is a Pacific sea turtle,” Georgia said, holding up the container that held the
reptile. It was about as big as Georgia’s torso, painted in a patchwork of green and
blue and brown, a beautiful animal unable to move in the tight space. Georgia opened
the door at
one end of the container, as if inviting the turtle to exit if he so chose. He chose
to stay where he was.

“There’s little chance our shark has encountered one of these, given the difference
in their habitats,” Georgia said. “This turtle would have no reason to spend time
where Stenton’s shark dwells, and the shark surely has never seen the light-dappled
areas where the turtles live.”

Mae wanted to ask if Georgia were truly about to feed that turtle to the shark. Its
eyes had beheld the predator below, and was now, with the slow energy it could harness,
pushing its way to the back of the container. Feeding this kindly creature to the
shark, no matter the necessity or scientific benefit, would not please many of Mae’s
watchers. Already zings were coming through her wrist.
Please don’t kill that turtle. It looks like my granddad!
There was a second thread, though, that insisted the shark, which was not much bigger
than the turtle, would not be able to swallow or digest the reptile, with its impenetrable
shell. But just when Mae was about to question the imminent feeding, an AG voice came
through Mae’s earpiece. “Hold tight. Stenton wants to see this happen.”

In the tank, the shark was circling again, looking every bit as lean and ravenous
as before. The lobster had been nothing to it, a meaningless snack. Now it rose closer
to Georgia, knowing the main course was approaching.

“Here we go,” Georgia said, and tilted the container until the turtle began sliding,
slowly, toward the neon water, which was swirling beneath him—the shark’s turning
had created a vortex. When the container was vertical, and the turtle’s head had cleared
the lucite threshold, the shark could wait no longer. It rose up, grabbed the
turtle’s head in its jaws, and pulled it under. And like the lobster, the turtle was
consumed in seconds, but this time it took a shape-shifting that the crustacean hadn’t
required. The shark seemed to unhook its jaw, doubling the size of its mouth, enabling
it to easily subsume the whole of the turtle in one swallow. Georgia was narrating,
saying something about how many sharks, when eating turtles, will turn their stomachs
inside out, vomiting the shells after digesting the fleshy parts of the reptile. But
Stenton’s shark had other methods. The shell seemed to dissolve inside the shark’s
mouth and stomach like a cracker soaked in saliva. And in less than a minute, the
turtle, all of it, had been turned to ash. It exited the shark as had the lobster,
in flakes that fell ponderously to the aquarium floor, joining, and indistinguishable
from, those that had come before.

Mae was watching this when she saw a figure, nearly a silhouette, on the other side
of the glass, beyond the aquarium’s far wall. His body was just a shadow, his face
invisible, but then, for a moment, the light from above reflected on the circling
shark’s skin, and revealed the figure’s face.

It was Kalden.

Mae hadn’t seen him in a month, and since her transparency, hadn’t heard any word
from him. Annie had been in Amsterdam, then China, then Japan, then back to Geneva,
and so hadn’t had time to focus on Kalden, but the two of them had traded occasional
messages about him. How concerned should they be about this unknown man?

But then he’d disappeared.

Now he was standing, looking at her, unmoving.

She wanted to call out, but then worried. Who was he? Would calling to him, capturing
him on camera, create some scene? Would
he flee? She was still in shock from the shark’s digestion of the turtle, from its
dull-eyed wrath, and she found she had no voice, no strength to say Kalden’s name.
So she stared at him, and he stared at her, and she had the thought that if she could
catch him on her camera, perhaps she could show this to Annie, and that might lead
to some clarity, some identification. But when Mae looked to her wrist, she saw only
the darkest form, his face obscured. Perhaps her lens couldn’t see him, was watching
from a different angle. As she tracked his shape on her wrist, he backed away and
walked off into the shadows.

Meanwhile, Georgia had been nattering about the shark and what they’d witnessed, and
Mae hadn’t caught any of it. But now she was standing atop her ladder, waving, hoping
that Mae was finished, because she had nothing left to feed the animal. The show was
over.

“Okay then,” Mae said, thankful for the chance to get away and to follow Kalden. She
said goodbye and thanks to Georgia, and walked briskly through the dark hallway.

She caught sight of his silhouette leaving through a faraway door, and she picked
up her pace, careful not to shake her lens or call out. The door he’d slipped through
led to the newsroom, which would be a logical enough place for Mae to be visiting
next. “Let’s see what’s going on in the newsroom,” she said, knowing all within would
be aware of her approach in the twenty steps it would take her to get there. She also
knew that the SeeChange cameras in the hallway, over the doorway, would have caught
Kalden, and she’d know sooner or later if it was actually him. Every movement within
the Circle was caught on one camera or another, usually three, and reconstructing
anyone’s movements, after the fact, was only a few minutes’ work.

As she approached the newsroom door, Mae thought of Kalden’s
hands upon her. His hands reaching low, pulling himself into her. She heard the low
rumble of his voice. His taste, like some wet fresh fruit. What if she found him?
She couldn’t take him to the bathroom. Or could she? She would find a way.

She opened the door to the newsroom, a wide space Bailey had modeled on old-time newspaper
offices, with a hundred low cubicles, news tickers and clocks everywhere, each desk
with a retro analog telephone, a row of white buttons below the numbers, blinking
arrhythmically. There were old printers, fax machines, telex devices, letterpresses.
The decor, of course, was for show. All the retro machines were nonfunctional. The
news gatherers, whose faces were now upon Mae, smiling, saying hello to her and her
watchers, were able to do most of their reporting via SeeChange. There were now over
a hundred million cameras functional and accessible around the world, making in-person
reporting unnecessarily expensive and dangerous, to say nothing of the carbon expenditures.

As Mae walked through the newsroom, the staff waved to her, unsure if this was an
official visit. Mae waved back, scanning the room, knowing she appeared distracted.
Where was Kalden? There was only one other exit, so Mae rushed through the room, nodding
and greeting, until she came to the door on the far end. She opened it, flinching
at the bright light of day, and saw him. He was crossing the wide green lawn, passing
the new sculpture by that Chinese dissident—she remembered she should highlight it
soon, maybe even today—and just then he turned briefly, as if checking to see if Mae
was still following. Her eyes met his, provoking a tiny smile before he turned again
and walked quickly around the Period of Five Dynasties.

“Where are you headed?” the voice in her ear asked.

“Sorry. No place. I was just. Never mind.”

Mae was allowed, of course, to go where she pleased—her meanderings were what so many
watchers appreciated most—but the Additional Guidance office still liked to check
in from time to time. As she stood in the sunlight, Circlers all around, she heard
her phone ring. She checked her wrist; there was no caller identified. She knew it
could only be Kalden.

“Hello?” she said.

“We have to meet,” he said.

“Excuse me?” she asked.

“Your watchers can’t hear me. They only hear you. Right now your engineers are wondering
why the incoming audio isn’t working. They’ll fix it in a few minutes.” His voice
was tense, shaky. “So listen. Most of what’s happening must stop. I’m serious. The
Circle is almost complete and Mae, you have to believe me that this will be bad for
you, for me, for humanity. When can we meet? If it has to be in the bathroom that’s
fine with me—”

Mae hung up.

“Sorry about that,” said AG through her earpiece. “Somehow the incoming audio wasn’t
working. We’re working on it. Who was it?”

Mae knew she couldn’t lie. She wasn’t sure if anyone had indeed heard Kalden. “Some
lunatic,” Mae improvised, proud of herself. “Babbling about the end of the world.”

Mae checked her wrist. Already people were wondering what had happened and how. The
most popular zing:
Tech problems at Circle HQ? Next: Santa forgets Christmas?

“Tell them the truth, as always,” AG said.

“Okay, I have no idea what just happened,” Mae said aloud. “When I do, I’ll let you
all know.”

But she was shaken. She was still standing, in the sunlight, waving occasionally to
Circlers noticing her. She knew her watchers might wonder what was happening next,
where she was going. She didn’t want to check her wrist, knowing that the comments
would be perplexed and even concerned. Off in the distance, she saw what looked like
a game of croquet, and alighting on an idea, she made her way to it.

“Now, as you all know,” she said when she was close enough to see and wave to the
four players, who she realized were two Circlers and a pair of visitors from Russia,
“we do not always play here at the Circle. Sometimes we have to work, which this group
is demonstrating. I don’t want to disturb them, but I can assure you that what they’re
doing involves problem-solving and complex algorithms and will result in the improving
of the products and services we can provide to you. Let’s soak this in.”