The Circle (46 page)

“Mae, no entity should have the power those guys have.”

“I’m hanging up.”

“Mae. Think about it. They’ll write songs about you.”

She hung up.

By the time she made it to the Great Hall, it was raucous with a few thousand Circlers.
The rest of the campus had been asked to stay at their workspaces, to demonstrate
to the world how Demoxie would work across the whole company, with Circlers voting
from their desks, from their tablets and phones and even retinally. On the screen
in the Great Room, a vast grid of SeeChange cameras showed Circlers at the ready in
every corner of every building. Sharma had explained, in one of a series of zings,
that once the Demoxie questions were sent, each
Circler’s ability to do anything else—any zing, any keystroke—would be suspended until
they voted.
Democracy is mandatory here!
she said, and added, much to Mae’s delight,
Sharing is caring
. Mae planned to vote on her wrist, and had promised her watchers that she would take
into account their input, too, if they were quick enough. The voting, Sharma suggested,
shouldn’t take longer than sixty seconds.

And then the Demoxie logo appeared on the screen, and the first question arrived below
it.

1. Should the Circle offer more veggie options at lunch?

The crowd in the Great Hall laughed. Sharma’s team had chosen to start with the question
they’d been testing. Mae checked her wrist, seeing that a few hundred watchers had
sent smiles, and so she chose that option and pushed “send.” She looked up to the
screen, watching Circlers vote, and within eleven seconds the whole campus had done
so, and the results were tabulated. Eighty-eight percent of the campus wanted more
veggie options at lunch.

A zing came through from Bailey:
It shall be done
.

The Great Hall shook with applause.

The next question appeared:
2. Should Take Your Daughter to Work Day happen twice a year, instead of just once?

The answer was known within 12 seconds. Forty-five percent said yes. Bailey zinged:
Looks like once is enough for now
.

The demonstration so far was a clear success, and Mae was basking in the congratulations
of Circlers in the room, and on her wrist, and from watchers worldwide. The third
question appeared, and the room broke up with laughter.

3. John or Paul or … Ringo?

The answer, which took 16 seconds, provoked a riot of surprised
cheers: Ringo had won, with 64 percent of the vote. John and Paul were nearly tied,
at 20 and 16.

The fourth question was preceded by a sober instruction:
Imagine the White House wanted the unfiltered opinion of its constituents. And imagine
you had the direct and immediate ability to influence U.S. foreign policy. Take your
time on this one. There might come a day—there should come a day—when all Americans
are heard in such matters
.

The instructions disappeared, and the question arrived:

4. Intelligence agencies have located terrorist mastermind Mohammed Khalil al-Hamed
in a lightly populated area of rural Pakistan. Should we send a drone to kill him,
considering the likelihood of moderate collateral damage?

Mae caught her breath. She knew this was a demonstration only, but the power felt
real. And it felt right. Why wouldn’t the wisdom of three hundred million Americans
be taken into account when making a decision that affected them all? Mae paused, thinking,
weighing the pros and cons. The Circlers in the room seemed to be taking the responsibility
as seriously as Mae. How many lives would be saved by killing al-Hamed? It could be
thousands, and the world would be rid of an evil man. The risk seemed worth it. She
voted yes. The full tally arrived after one minute, eleven seconds: 71 percent of
Circlers favored a drone strike. A hush fell over the room.

Then the last question appeared:

5. Is Mae Holland awesome or what?

Mae laughed, and the room laughed, and Mae blushed, thinking this was all a bit much.
She decided she couldn’t vote on this one, given how absurd it would be to cast a
vote either way, and she simply watched her wrist, which, she soon realized, had been
frozen. Soon the
question on her wristscreen was blinking urgently.
All Circlers must vote
, the screen said, and she remembered that the survey couldn’t be complete until every
Circler had registered their opinion. Because she felt silly calling herself awesome,
she pushed “frown,” guessing it would be the only one, and would get a laugh.

But when the votes were tallied, seconds later, she was not the only one to have sent
a frown. The vote was 97 percent to 3, smiles to frowns, indicating that overwhelmingly,
her fellow Circlers found her awesome. When the numbers appeared, the Great Room erupted
in whoops, and she was patted on the back as everyone filed out, feeling the experiment
a monumental success. And Mae felt this way, too. She knew Demoxie was working, and
its potential unlimited. And she knew she should feel good about 97 percent of the
campus finding her awesome. But as she left the hall, and made her way across campus,
she could only think of the 3 percent who did not find her awesome. She did the math.
If there were now 12,318 Circlers—they’d just subsumed a Philadelphia startup specializing
in the gamification of affordable housing—and every one of them had voted, that meant
that 369 people had frowned at her, thought she was something other than awesome.
No, 368. She’d frowned at herself, assuming she’d be the only one.

She felt numb. She felt naked. She walked through the health club, glancing at the
bodies sweating, stepping on and off machines, and she wondered who among them had
frowned at her. Three hundred and sixty-eight people loathed her. She was devastated.
She left the health club and looked for a quiet place to collect her thoughts. She
made her way to the rooftop near her old pod, where Dan had first told her of the
Circle’s commitment to community. It was a half-mile
walk from where she was, and she wasn’t sure she could make it. She was being stabbed.
She had been stabbed. Who were these people? What had she done to them? They didn’t
know her. Or did they? And what kind of community members would send a frown to someone
like Mae, who was working tirelessly with them,
for
them, in full view?

She was trying to hold it together. She smiled when she passed fellow Circlers. She
accepted their congratulations and gratitude, each time wondering which of them was
two-faced, which of them had pushed that frown button, each push of that button the
pull of a trigger. That was it, she realized. She felt full of holes, as if every
one of them had shot her, from behind, cowards filling her with holes. She could barely
stand.

And then, just before reaching her old building, she saw Annie. They hadn’t had a
natural interaction in months, but immediately something in Annie’s face spoke of
light and happiness. “Hey!” she said, catapulting herself forward to take Mae in a
wraparound hug.

Mae’s eyes were suddenly wet, and she wiped them, feeling silly and elated and confused.
All her conflicted thoughts of Annie were, for a moment, washed away.

“You’re doing well?” she asked.

“I am. I am. So many good things happening,” Annie said. “Did you hear about the PastPerfect
project?”

Mae sensed something in Annie’s voice then, an indication that Annie was talking,
primarily, to the audience around Mae’s neck. Mae went along.

“Well, you told me the gist before. What’s new with PastPerfect, Annie?”

While looking at Annie, and appearing interested in what Annie was saying, Mae’s mind
was elsewhere: Had Annie frowned at her? Maybe just to knock her down a notch? And
how would
Annie
fare in a Demoxie poll? Could she beat 97 percent? Could anyone?

“Oh gosh, so many things, Mae. As you know, PastPerfect has been in the works for
many years. It’s what you might call a passion project of Eamon Bailey. What if, he
thought, we used the power of the web, and of the Circle and its billions of members,
to try to fill in the gaps in personal history, and history generally?”

Mae, seeing her friend trying so hard, could do nothing but try to match her glossy
enthusiasm.

“Whoa, that sounds incredible. Last we talked, they were looking for a pioneer to
be the first to have their ancestry mapped. Did they find that person?”

“Well, they did, Mae, I’m glad you asked. They found that person, and that person
is me.”

“Oh, right. So they really didn’t choose yet?”

“No, really,” Annie said, her voice lowering, and suddenly sounding more like the
actual Annie. Then she brightened again, rising an octave. “It’s me!”

Mae had become practiced in waiting before speaking—transparency had taught her to
measure every word—and now, instead of saying, “I expected it to be some newbie, someone
without a whole lot of experience. Or at the very least a striver, someone trying
to make some PartiRank leaps, or curry favor with the Wise Men. But you?” She realized
that Annie was, or felt she was, in a position where she needed a boost, an edge.
And thus she’d volunteered.

“You volunteered?”

“I did. I did,” Annie said, looking at Mae but utterly through her. “The more I heard
about it, the more I wanted to be the first. As you know, but your watchers might
not, my family came here on the
Mayflower
”—and here she rolled her eyes—“and though we have some high-water marks in our family
history, there’s so much I don’t know.”

Mae was speechless. Annie had gone haywire. “And everyone’s onboard with this? Your
parents?”

“They’re so excited. I guess they’ve always been proud of our heritage, and the ability
to share it with people, and along the way find out a bit about the history of the
country, well, it appealed to them. Speaking of parents, how are yours?”

My god, this was strange, Mae thought. There were so many layers to all this, and
while her mind was counting them, mapping them and naming them, her face and mouth
had to carry on this conversation.

“They’re fine,” Mae said, even though she knew, and Annie knew, that Mae hadn’t been
in touch with them in weeks. They had sent word, through a cousin, of their health,
which was fine, but they had left their home, “fleeing” was the only word they used
in their brief message, telling Mae not to worry about anything.

Mae wrapped up the conversation with Annie and walked slowly, foggy-headed, back through
campus, knowing Annie was satisfied in how she’d communicated her news, and trumped
and thoroughly confused Mae, all in one brief encounter. Annie had been appointed
the center of PastPerfect and Mae hadn’t been told, and was made to look idiotic.
Certainly that would have been Annie’s goal. And why
Annie?
It didn’t make sense to go to Annie, when it would have been easier to have Mae do
it; Mae was already transparent.

Mae realized that Annie had asked for this. Begged the Wise Men for this. Her proximity
to them had made it possible. And so Mae was not as close as she’d imagined; Annie
still held some particular status. Again Annie’s lineage, her head start, the varied
and ancient advantages she enjoyed, were keeping Mae second. Always second, like she
was some kind of little sister who never had a chance of succeeding an older, always
older sibling. Mae was trying to remain calm, but messages were coming through her
wrist that made clear her viewers were seeing her frustration, her distraction.

She needed to breathe. She needed to think. But there was too much in her head. There
was Annie’s ludicrous gamesmanship. There was this ridiculous PastPerfect thing, which
should have gone to Mae. Was it because Mae’s parents had slipped off the path? And
where
were
her parents, anyway? Why were they sabotaging everything Mae was working for? But
what was she working for, anyway, if 368 Circlers didn’t approve of her? Three hundred
and sixty-eight people who apparently actively hated her, enough to push a button
at her—to send their loathing directly to her, knowing she would know, immediately,
their sentiments. And what about this cellular mutation some Scottish scientist was
worried about? A cancerous mutation that might be happening inside Mae, provoked by
mistakes in her diet? Had that really happened? And shit, Mae thought, her throat
tightening, did she really send a frown to a group of heavily armed paramilitaries
in Guatemala? What if they had contacts here? Certainly there were plenty of Guatemalans
in California, and certainly they would be more than happy to have a trophy like Mae,
to punish her for her
opprobrium. Fuck, she thought. Fuck. There was a pain in her, a pain that was spreading
its black wings inside her. And it was coming, primarily, from the 368 people who
apparently hated her so much they wanted her gone. It was one thing to send a frown
to Central America, but to send one just across campus? Who would do that? Why was
there so much animosity in the world? And then it occurred to her, in a brief and
blasphemous flash: she didn’t
want
to know how they felt. The flash opened up into something larger, an even more blasphemous
notion that her brain contained too much. That the volume of information, of data,
of judgments, of measurements, was too much, and there were too many people, and too
many desires of too many people, and too many opinions of too many people, and too
much pain from too many people, and having all of it constantly collated, collected,
added and aggregated, and presented to her as if that all made it tidier and more
manageable—it was too much. But no. No, it was not, her better brain corrected. No.
You’re hurt by these 368 people. This was the truth. She was hurt by them, by the
368 votes to kill her. Every one of them preferred her dead. If only she didn’t know
about this. If only she could return to life before this 3 percent, when she could
walk through campus, waving, smiling, chatting idly, eating, sharing human contact,
without knowing what was deep in the hearts of the 3 percent. To frown at her, to
stick their fingers at that button, to shoot her that way, it was a kind of murder.
Mae’s wrist was flashing with dozens of messages of concern. With help from the campus
SeeChange cameras, watchers were noticing her standing, stock-still, her face contorted
into some raging, wretched mask.