The Circle (38 page)

“Mae.”

She ignored it on purpose.

“Mae.”

Her name, spoken by her voice, continued to hold its power over her. And she hadn’t
discovered why.

“Mae.”

It sounded, this time, like some purer version of herself.

“Mae.”

She looked down to her bracelet, seeing a number of zings asking if she was okay.
She knew she had to respond, lest her watchers think she’d lost her mind. This was
one of the many small adjustments she had to get used to—now there were thousands
out there seeing what she saw, having access to her health data, hearing her voice,
seeing her face—she was always visible through one or another of the campus SeeChange
cameras, in addition to the one on her monitor—and so when anything deviated from
her normal buoyancy, people noticed.

“Mae.”

She wanted to hear it again, so she said nothing.

“Mae.”

It was a young woman’s voice, a young woman’s voice that sounded bright and fierce
and capable of anything.

“Mae.”

It was a better, more indomitable version of herself.

“Mae.”

She felt stronger every time she heard it.

She stayed at CE until five, when she showed her watchers the newest Clarification,
the governor of Arizona, and enjoyed the surprise transparency of the governor’s entire
staff—something that many officials were doing, to ensure to their constituents that
deals were not being done, in darkness, outside the light of the clear leader. At
the Clarifying event, Mae met up with Renata and Denise and Josiah—these Circlers
who had once wielded some power over her and now were her acolytes—and afterward,
they all had dinner in the Glass Eatery. There was little reason to leave campus for
meals given that Bailey, hoping to engender more discussions and brain-sharing and
socialization among Circlers, had instituted a new policy, whereby all food would
be not only free, as it always had been, but prepared daily by a different notable
chef. The chefs were happy for the exposure—thousands of Circlers smiling, zinging,
posting photos—and the program was instantly and wildly popular and the cafeterias
were overflowing with people and, presumably, ideas.

Among the bustle that night, Mae ate, feeling unsteady, Kalden’s
words and cryptic messages still rattling in her head. She was glad, then, for the
distractions of the night. The improv comedy battle was appropriately terrible and
funny despite its wall-to-wall incompetence, the Pakistan fundraiser was thoroughly
inspiring—the event was able to amass 2.3 million smiles for the school—and finally
there was the barbecue, where Mae allowed herself a second glass of wine before settling
into her dorm.

The room had been hers for six weeks now. It no longer made sense to drive back to
her apartment, which was expensive and, last time she’d been there, after being gone
for eight days, had mice. So she gave it up, and became one of the hundred Settlers,
Circlers who had moved onto campus permanently. The advantages were obvious and the
waiting list was now 1,209 names long. There was room on campus now for 288 Circlers,
and the company had just bought a nearby building, a former factory, planning to convert
it into 500 more rooms. Mae’s had been upgraded and now had fully smart appliances,
wallscreens and shades, everything centrally monitored. The room was cleaned daily
and the refrigerator stocked with both her standard items—tracked via Homie—and products
in beta. She could have anything she wanted so long as she provided feedback to the
manufacturers.

She washed her face and brushed her teeth and settled into the cloud-white bed. Transparency
was optional after ten p.m., and she usually went dark after her teeth-brushing, which
she found people interested in generally, and, she believed, might promote good dental
health among her younger watchers. At 10:11 p.m., she said good-night to her watchers—there
were only 98,027 at that point, a few thousand of whom reciprocated her good-night
wishes—lifted the
lens over her head and placed it in its case. She was allowed to turn off the SeeChange
cameras in the room, but she found she rarely did. She knew that the footage she might
gather, herself, for instance about movements during sleep, could be valuable someday,
so she left the cameras on. It had taken a few weeks to get used to sleeping with
her wrist monitors—she’d scratched her face one night, and cracked her right screen
another—but Circle engineers had improved the design, replacing the rigid screens
with more flexible, unbreakable ones, and now she felt incomplete without them.

She sat up in bed, knowing that it usually took her an hour or so to make her way
to sleep. She turned on the wallscreen, planning to check on her parents. But their
SeeChange cameras were all dark. She sent them a zing, expecting no answer and getting
none. She sent a message to Annie but got no response. She paged through her Zing
feed, reading a few funny ones, and, because she’d lost six pounds since going transparent,
she spent twenty minutes looking for a new skirt and T-shirt, and somewhere in the
eighth site she visited, she felt the tear opening up in her again. For no good reason,
she checked to see if Mercer’s site was still down, and found it was. She looked for
any recent mention of him online or news of his whereabouts, and found none. The tear
was growing within her, opening quickly, a fathomless blackness spreading under her.
In her fridge she had some of the sake Francis had introduced her to, so she got up,
poured herself far too much, and drank it down. She went to the SeeChange portal and
watched feeds from beaches in Sri Lanka and Brazil, feeling calmer, feeling warmer,
and then remembered that a few thousand college kids, calling themselves ChangeSeers,
had spread themselves all over the planet, installing cameras in the most remote regions.
So
for a time she watched the view from a camera in a Namibian desert village, a pair
of women preparing a meal, their children playing in the background, but after a few
minutes watching, she found the tear opening wider, the underwater screams getting
louder, an unbearable hiss. She looked again for Kalden, spelling his name in new
and irrational ways, scanning, for forty-five minutes, the company directory by face,
finding no one like him at all. She turned off the SeeChange cameras, poured more
sake, drank it down and got into bed, and, thinking of Kalden and his hands, his thin
legs, his long fingers, she circled her nipples with her left hand while, with her
right, she moved her underwear to the side and simulated the movements of a tongue,
of his tongue. It had no effect. But the sake was draining her mind of worry, and
finally, at just before twelve, she found something like sleep.

“Okay, everyone,” Mae said. The morning was bright and she was feeling chipper enough
to try out a phrase she hoped might catch on Circle-wide or beyond. “This is a day
like every other day, in that it is unlike any other day!” After she said it, Mae
checked her wrist, but saw little sign it had struck a nerve. She was momentarily
deflated, but the day itself, the unlimited promise it offered, buoyed her. It was
9:34 a.m., the sun was again bright and warm, and the campus was busy and abuzz. If
the Circlers needed any confirmation that they were in the middle of everything that
mattered, the day had already brought it. Starting at 8:31, a series of helicopters
had shaken the campus, bringing leaders from all the major health insurance companies,
world health agencies, the Centers for Disease
Control, and every significant pharmaceutical company. Finally, it was rumored, there
would be complete information-sharing among all of these previously disconnected and
even adversarial entities, and when they were coordinated, and once all the health
data they’d collected was shared, most of this made possible through the Circle and
more importantly, TruYou, viruses could be stopped at their sources, diseases would
be tracked to their roots. All morning Mae had watched these executives and doctors
and officials stride happily through the grounds, heading for the just-built Hippocampus.
There, they’d have a day of meetings—private this time, with public forums promised
in the future—and, later, there would be a concert from some aging singer-songwriter
only Bailey cared for, who had come in the night before, for dinner with the Wise
Men.

Most important for Mae, though, was that one of the many morning helicopters contained
Annie, who was finally coming home. She’d been gone for almost a month in Europe and
China and Japan, ironing out some regulatory wrinkles, meeting with some of the transparent
leaders there, the results of which seemed good, judging from the number of smiles
Annie had posted on her Zing feed at the trip’s conclusion. But more meaningful conversation
between Mae and Annie had been difficult. Annie had congratulated her on her transparency,
on her
ascension
, as Annie put it, but then had become very busy. Too busy to write notes of consequence,
too busy to have phone calls she could be proud of, she’d said. They’d exchanged brief
messages every day, but Annie’s schedule had been, in her words,
madcap
, and the time difference meant they were rarely in sync and able to exchange anything
profound.

Annie had promised to arrive in the morning, direct from Beijing,
and Mae was having trouble concentrating while waiting. She’d been watching the helicopters
land, squinting high on the rooftops, looking for Annie’s yellow head, to no avail.
And now she had to spend an hour at the Protagorean Pavilion, a task she knew was
important and normally would find fascinating but today felt like an unbreachable
wall between herself and her closest friend.

On a granite panel outside the Protagorean Pavilion the building’s namesake was quoted
loosely:
Humans are the measure of all things
. “More important for our purposes,” Mae said, opening the door, “is that now, with
the tools available,
humans
can
measure
all things. Isn’t that right Terry?”

In front of her stood a tall Korean-American man, Terry Min. “Hello Mae, hello Mae’s
watchers and followers.”

“You cut your hair some new way,” Mae said.

With Annie coming back, Mae was feeling loopy, goofy, and Terry was temporarily derailed.
He hadn’t counted on ad-libs. “Uh, yeah,” he said, running his fingers through it.

“It’s angular,” Mae said.

“Right. It is more angular. Should we go inside?”

“We should.”

The designers of the building had taken pains to use organic shapes, to soften the
rigid math of the engineers’ daily work. The atrium was encased in silver and seemed
to undulate, as if they stood at the bottom of an enormous corrugated tube.

“What will we be seeing today, Terry?”

“I thought we’d start with a tour, and then go a bit deeper with some stuff we’re
doing for the educational sector.”

Mae followed Terry through the building, which was more of an engineer’s lair than
the parts of campus she’d become accustomed to visiting. The trick with her audience
was to balance the mundane with the more glamorous parts of the Circle; both were
necessary to reveal, and certainly thousands of viewers were more interested in the
boiler-rooms than the penthouses, but the calibration had to be precise.

They passed Josef and his teeth, and then said hello to various developers and engineers,
each of whom turned to explain their work as best as they could. Mae checked the time
and saw there was a new notice from Dr. Villalobos. She asked Mae to come visit as
soon as she could.
Nothing urgent
, she said.
But it should be today
. As they made their way through the building, Mae typed back to the doctor, saying
she’d see her in thirty minutes. “Should we see the education project now?”

“I think that’s a great idea,” Terry said.

They walked through a curving hallway and into a great open space, with at least a
hundred Circlers working without division. It looked a bit like a midcentury stock
market.

“As your viewers might know,” Terry said, “the Department of Education has given us
a nice grant—”

“Wasn’t it three billion dollars?” Mae asked.

“Well, who’s counting?” Terry said, abundantly satisfied with the number and what
it demonstrated, which was that Washington knew the Circle could measure anything,
including student achievement,
better than they ever hope to. “But the point is that they asked us to design and
implement a more effective wraparound data assessment system for the nation’s students.
Oh wait, this is cool,” Terry said.

They stopped in front of a woman and a small child. He looked about three, and was
playing with a very shiny silver watch attached to his wrist.

“Hi Marie,” Terry said to the woman. “This is Mae, as you probably know.”

“I
do
know Mae,” Marie said in the slightest French accent, “and Michel here does, too.
Say hello, Michel.”

Michel chose to wave.

“Say something to Michel, Mae,” Terry said.

“How are you, Michel?” Mae said.

“Okay, now show her,” Terry said, nudging Michel’s shoulder.

On its tiny display, the watch on Michel’s wrist had registered the four words Mae
had just said. Below these numbers was a counter, with the number 29,266 displayed.

“Studies show that kids need to hear at least 30,000 words a day,” Marie explained.
“So the watch does a very simple thing by recognizing, categorizing and, most crucially,
counting those words. This is primarily for kids at home, and before school age. Once
they’re there, we’re assuming all this is tracked in the classroom.”

“That’s a good segue,” Terry said. They thanked Marie and Michel, and made their way
down the hall to a large room decorated like a classroom but rebooted, with dozens
of screens, ergonomic chairs, collaborative workspaces.

“Oh, here’s Jackie,” Terry said.

Jackie, a sleek woman in her mid-thirties, emerged and shook
Mae’s hand. She was wearing a sleeveless dress, highlighting her broad shoulders and
mannequin arms. She had a small cast on her right wrist.