The Circle (44 page)

“So now we get to the meat of today’s session, and that is: What if your Circle profile
automatically
registered you to vote?”

Bailey swept his eyes across the room, hesitating again at Mae and her watchers. She
checked her wrist.
Goosebumps
, one viewer wrote.

“With TruYou, to set up a profile, you have to be a real person, with a real address,
complete personal info, a real Social Security number, a real and verifiable date
of birth. In other words, all the information the government traditionally wants when
you register to vote. In fact, as you all know, we have far
more
information. So why wouldn’t this be enough information to allow you to register?
Or better yet, why wouldn’t the government—our government or any government—just
consider you registered
once you set up a TruYou profile?”

The forty heads in the room nodded, some out of acknowledgement of a sensible idea,
some clearly having thought of this before, that it was a notion long discussed.

Mae checked her bracelet. The viewer numbers were climbing quicker, ten thousand a
second, and were now over 2,400,000. She had 1,248 messages. Most had come through
in the last ninety seconds. Bailey glanced down at his own tablet, no doubt seeing
the same numbers she was seeing. Smiling, he continued: “There’s no reason. And a
lot of legislators agree with me. Congresswoman Santos does, for one. And I have verbal
commitments from 181 other members of Congress and 32 senators. They’ve all agreed
to push legislation to make your TruYou profile your automatic path to registration.
Not bad, right?”

There was a brief round of applause.

“Now think,” Bailey said, his voice a whisper of hope and wonder, “think if we can
get closer to full participation in all elections. There would be no more grumbling
from the sidelines from people who had neglected to participate. There would be no
more candidates who had been elected by a fringe, wedge group. As we know here at
the Circle, with full participation comes full knowledge. We know what Circlers want
because we ask, and because they know their answers are necessary to get a full and
accurate picture of the desires of the whole Circle community. So if we observe the
same model nationally, electorally, then we can get very close, I think, to 100 percent
participation. One hundred percent democracy.”

Applause rippled through the room. Bailey smiled broadly, and Stenton stood; it was,
for him at least, apparently the end of the presentation.
But an idea had been forming within Mae’s mind, and she raised her hand, tentatively.

“Yes Mae,” Bailey said, his face still locked into a broad grin of triumph.

“Well, I wonder if we couldn’t take this one step further. I mean … Well, actually,
I don’t think it—”

“No, no. Go on, Mae. You started well. I like the words
one step further
. That’s how this company was built.”

Mae looked around the room, the faces a mix of encouraging and concerned. Then she
alighted on Annie’s face, and because it was stern, and dissatisfied, and seemed to
be expecting, or wanting, Mae to fail, to embarrass herself, Mae gathered herself,
took a breath, and forged ahead.

“Okay, well, you were saying we could get close to 100 percent participation. And
I wonder why we couldn’t just work backwards from that goal, using all the steps you
outlined. All the tools we already have.”

Mae looked around the room, ready to quit at the first pair of skeptical eyes, but
she saw only curiosity, the slow collective nodding of a group practiced in pre-emptive
validation.

“Go on,” Bailey said.

“I’m just going to connect some dots,” Mae said. “Well, first of all, we all agree
that we’d like 100 percent participation, and that everyone would agree that 100 percent
participation is the ideal.”

“Yes,” Bailey said. “It’s certainly the idealist’s ideal.”

“And we currently have 83 percent of the voting-age Americans registered on the Circle?”

“Yes.”

“And it seems that we’re on our way to voters being able to register, and maybe even
to actually vote, through the Circle.”

Bailey’s head was bobbing side to side, some indication of mild doubt, but he was
smiling, his eyes encouraging. “A small leap, but okay. Go on.”

“So why not
require
every voting-age citizen to have a Circle account?”

There was some shuffling in the room, some intake of breath, mostly from the older
Circlers.

“Let her finish,” someone, a new voice, said. Mae looked around to find Stenton near
the door. His armed were crossed, his eyes staring at the floor. He looked, briefly,
up to Mae, and nodded brusquely. She regained her direction.

“Okay, I know the initial reaction will be resistance. I mean, how can we
require
anyone to use our services? But we have to remember that there are all kinds of things
that are mandatory for citizens of this country—and these things are mandatory in
most industrialized countries. Do you have to send your kids to school? Yes. That’s
mandatory. It’s a law. Kids have to go to school, or you have to arrange some kind
of home schooling. But it’s mandatory. It’s also mandatory that you register for the
draft, right? That you get rid of your garbage in an acceptable way; you can’t drop
it on the street. You have to have a license if you want to drive, and when you do,
you have to wear a seat belt.”

Stenton joined in again. “We require people to pay taxes. And to pay into Social Security.
To serve on juries.”

“Right,” Mae said, “and to pee indoors, not on the streets. I mean,
we have ten thousand laws. We require so many legitimate things of citizens of the
United States. So why can’t we require them to vote? They do in dozens of countries.”

“It’s been proposed here,” one of the older Circlers said.

“Not by us,” Stenton countered.

“And that’s my point,” Mae said, nodding to Stenton. “The technology has never been
there before. I mean, at any other moment in history, it would have been prohibitively
expensive to track down everyone and register them to vote, and then to make sure
they actually did. You’d have to go door to door. Drive people to polls. All these
unfeasible things. Even in the countries where it’s mandatory, it’s not really enforced.
But now it’s within reach. I mean, you cross-reference any voting rolls with the names
in our TruYou database, and you’d find half the missing voters right there and then.
You register them automatically, and then when election day comes around, you make
sure they vote.”

“How do we do that?” a female voice said. Mae realized it was Annie’s. It wasn’t a
direct challenge, but the tone wasn’t friendly, either.

“Oh jeez,” Bailey said, “a hundred ways. That’s an easy part. You remind them ten
times that day. Maybe their accounts don’t work that day till they vote. That’s what
I’d favor anyway. ‘Hello Annie!’ it could say. ‘Take five minutes to vote.’ Whatever
it is. We do that for our own surveys. You know that, Annie.” And when he said her
name, he shaded it with disappointment and warning, discouraging her from opening
her mouth again. He brightened and turned back to Mae. “And the stragglers?” he asked.

Mae smiled at him. She had an answer. She looked at her bracelet.
There were now 7,202,821 people watching. When had that happened?

“Well, everyone has to pay taxes, right? How many people do it online now? Last year,
maybe 80 percent. What if we all stopped duplicating services and made it all part
of one unified system? You use your Circle account to pay taxes, to register to vote,
to pay your parking tickets, to do anything. I mean, we would save each user hundreds
of hours of inconvenience, and collectively, the country would save billions.”

“
Hundreds
of billions,” Stenton amended.

“Right,” Mae said. “Our interfaces are infinitely easier to use than, say, the patchwork
of DMV sites around the country. What if you could renew your license through us?
What if every government service could be facilitated through our network? People
would leap at the chance. Instead of visiting a hundred different sites for a hundred
different government services, it could all be done through the Circle.”

Annie opened her mouth again. Mae knew it was a mistake. “But why wouldn’t the government,”
Annie asked, “just build a similar wraparound service? Why do they need us?”

Mae couldn’t decide if she was asking this rhetorically or if she truly felt this
was a valid point. In any case, much of the room was now snickering. The government
building a system, from scratch, to rival the Circle? Mae looked to Bailey and to
Stenton. Stenton smiled, raised his chin, and decided to take this one himself.

“Well, Annie, a government project to build a similar platform from the ground up
would be ludicrous, and costly, and, well, impossible. We already have the infrastructure,
and 83 percent of the electorate. Does that make sense to you?”

Annie nodded, her eyes showing fear and regret and maybe even some quickly fading
defiance. Stenton’s tone was dismissive, and Mae hoped he would soften when he continued.

“Now more than ever,” he said, but now more condescending than before, “Washington
is trying to save money, and is disinclined to build vast new bureaucracies from scratch.
Right now it costs the government about ten dollars to facilitate every vote. Two
hundred million people vote, and it costs the feds two billion to run the presidential
election every four years. Just to process the votes for that one election, that one
day. You factor in every state and local election, we’re talking hundreds of billions
every year in unnecessary costs associated with simple vote processing. I mean, they’re
still doing it on paper in some states. If we provide these services for free, we’re
saving the government billions of dollars, and, more importantly, the results would
be known simultaneously. Do you see the truth in that?”

Annie nodded grimly, and Stenton looked to her, as if assessing her anew. He turned
to Mae, urging her to continue.

“And if it’s mandatory to have a TruYou account to pay taxes or receive any government
service,” she said, “then we’re very close to having 100 percent of the citizenry.
And then we can take the temperature of everyone at any time. A small town wants everyone
to vote on a local ordinance. TruYou knows everyone’s address, so only residents of
that town can vote. And when they do, the results are known in minutes. A state wants
to see how everyone feels about a new tax. Same thing—instant and clear and verifiable
data.”

“It would eliminate the guesswork,” Stenton said, now standing at the head of the
table. “Eliminate lobbyists. Eliminate polls. It might even eliminate Congress. If
we can know the will of the people at
any time, without filter, without misinterpretation or bastardization, wouldn’t it
eliminate much of Washington?”

The night was cold and the winds were lacerating but Mae didn’t notice. Everything
felt good, clean and right. To have the validation of the Wise Men, to have perhaps
pivoted the entire company in a new direction, to have, perhaps,
perhaps
, ensured a new level of participatory democracy—could it be that the Circle, with
her new idea, might really
perfect
democracy? Could she have conceived of the solution to a thousand-year-old problem?

There had been some concern, just after the meeting, about a private company taking
over a very public act like voting. But the logic of it, the savings inherent, was
winning the day. What if the schools had two hundred billion? What if the health care
system had two hundred billion? Any number of the country’s ills would be addressed
or solved with that kind of savings—savings not just every four years, but some semblance
of them every year. To eliminate all costly elections, replaced by instantaneous ones,
all of them nearly cost-free?

This was the promise of the Circle. This was the unique position of the Circle. This
is what people were zinging. She read the zings as she rode with Francis, in a train
under the bay, the two of them grinning, out of their minds. They were being recognized.
People were stepping in front of Mae to get onto her video feed, and she didn’t care,
hardly noticed, because the news coming through her right bracelet was too good to
take her eyes off.

She checked her left arm, briefly; her pulse was elevated, her heart rate at 130.
But she was loving it. When they arrived downtown, they
took the stairs three at a time and arrived above ground, suddenly lit in gold, on
Market Street, the Bay Bridge blinking beyond.

“Holy shit, it’s Mae!” Who had said that? Mae found, hurrying toward them, a teenaged
pair, hoodies and headphones. “Rock on, Mae,” the other one said, their eyes approving,
starstruck, before the two of them, clearly not wanting to seem stalky, hurried down
the stairs.

“That was fun,” Francis said, watching them descend.

Mae walked toward the water. She thought of Mercer and saw him as a shadow, quickly
disappearing. She hadn’t heard from him, or Annie, since the talk, and she didn’t
care. Her parents hadn’t said a word, and might not have seen her performance, and
she found herself unconcerned. She cared only about this moment, this night, the sky
clear and starless.

“I can’t believe how poised you were,” Francis said, and he kissed her—a dry, professional
kiss on the lips.

“Was I okay?” she asked, knowing how ridiculous it sounded, this kind of doubt in
the wake of such an obvious success, but wanting once more to hear that she had done
a good job.

“You were perfect,” he said. “A 100.”

Quickly, as they walked toward the water, she scrolled through the most popular recent
comments. There seemed to be one particular zing with heat, something about how all
this could or would lead to totalitarianism. Her stomach sank.

“C’mon. You can’t listen to a lunatic like that,” Francis said. “What does she know?
Some crank somewhere with a tin-foil hat.” Mae smiled, not knowing what the tin-foil
hat reference meant, but knowing she’d heard her father say it, and it made her smile
to think of him saying it.