Authors: Dave Eggers
The Circle (49 page)
Ten minutes later Mae was sitting in her usual stall, and heard Annie enter the one
next door. Mae was relieved that Annie had reached out to her, thrilled at having
her so close again. Mae could right all wrongs now, and was determined to do so.
“Are we alone?” Annie asked.
“Audio’s off for three minutes. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. It’s just this PastPerfect thing. They’re starting to dole out the results
to me, and it’s already pretty disturbing. And tomorrow it goes public, and I’m assuming
it’ll get even worse.”
“Wait. What did they find? I thought they were starting in the Middle Ages or something.”
“They are. But even then, it’s like both sides of my family are these blackhearted
people. I mean, I didn’t even know the British
had
Irish slaves, did you?”
“No. I don’t think so. You mean, white Irish slaves?”
“Thousands of them. My ancestors were the ringleaders or something. They raided Ireland,
brought back slaves, sold them all over the world. It’s so fucked up.”
“Annie—”
“I mean, I know they’re sure about this because it’s cross-referenced a few thousand
ways, but do I look like a descendent of slave owners?”
“Annie, give yourself a break. Something that happened six hundred years ago has nothing
to do with you. Everyone’s bloodline has rough patches, I’m sure. You can’t take it
personally.”
“Sure, but at the very least it’s embarrassing, right? It means that it’s part of
me, at least to everyone I know. To the next people I see, this’ll be part of me.
They’ll be seeing me, and talking to me, but this will be part of me, too. It’s mapped
this new layer onto me, and I don’t feel like that’s fair. It’s like if I knew your
dad was a former Klansman—”
“You’re completely overthinking it. No one, I mean no one, will look at you funny
because some ancient ancestor of yours had slaves
from Ireland. I mean, it’s so insane, and so distant, that no one will possibly connect
you to it. You know how people are. No one can remember anything like that anyway.
And to hold you responsible? No chance.”
“And they killed a bunch of these slaves, too. There’s some story about a rebellion,
and that some relative of mine led some mass slaughter of a thousand men and women
and children. It’s so sick. I just—”
“Annie. Annie. You’ve got to calm down. First of all, our time’s up. Audio’s going
back up in a second. Secondly, you just cannot worry about this. These people were
practically cavemen. Everyone’s cavemen ancestors were assholes.”
Annie laughed, a loud snort.
“Promise me you won’t worry?”
“Sure.”
“Annie. Don’t worry about this. Promise me.”
“Okay.”
“You promise?”
“I promise. I’ll try not to.”
“Okay. Time.”
When the news of Annie’s ancestors went out the next day, Mae felt at least partially
vindicated. There were some unproductive comments out there, sure, but for the most
part the reaction was a collective shrug. No one cared much about how this connected
to Annie, but there was new and possibly useful attention brought to the long-forgotten
moment in history, when the British went to Ireland and left with human currency.
Annie seemed to be taking it all in stride. Her zings were positive, and she recorded
a brief announcement for her video feed, talking about the surprise in finding out
this unfortunate role some distant part of her bloodline played in this grim historical
moment. But then she tried to add some perspective and levity to it, and to ensure
that this revelation wouldn’t dissuade others from exploring their personal history
through PastPerfect. “Everyone’s ancestors were assholes,” she said, and Mae, watching
the feed on her bracelet, laughed.
But Mercer, true to form, was not laughing. Mae hadn’t heard from him in over a month,
but then, in Friday’s mail (the only day the post office still operated), was a letter.
She didn’t want to read it, because she knew it would be ornery, and accusatory and
judgmental. But he’d already written a letter like that, hadn’t he? She opened it,
guessing that he couldn’t possibly be worse than he’d been before.
She was wrong. This time he couldn’t even bring himself to type the Dear before her
name.
Mae,
I know I said I wouldn’t write again. But now that Annie’s on the verge of ruin, I
hope that gives you some pause. Please tell her she should cease her participation
in that experiment, which I assure you and her will end badly. We are not meant to
know everything, Mae. Did you ever think that perhaps our minds are delicately calibrated
between the known and the unknown? That our souls need the mysteries of night and
the clarity of day? You people are creating a world of ever-present
daylight, and I think it will burn us all alive. There will be no time to reflect,
to sleep, to cool. Did it occur to you Circle people, ever, that we can only contain
so much? Look at us. We’re tiny. Our heads are tiny, the size of melons. You want
these heads of ours to contain everything the world has ever seen? It will not work.
Mae’s wrist was popping.
Why do you bother, Mae?
I’m already bored
.
You’re only feeding Sasquatch. Don’t feed Sasquatch!
Her heart was already thumping, and she knew she shouldn’t read the rest. But she
couldn’t stop.
I happened to be at my parents’ house when you did your little idea meeting with the
Digital Brownshirts. They insisted on watching it; they’re so proud of you, despite
how horrifying that session was. Even so, I’m glad I watched that spectacle (just
as I’m glad I watched
Triumph of the Will
). It gave me the last nudge I needed to take the step I’d been planning anyway.
I’m moving north, to the densest and most uninteresting forest I can find. I know
that your cameras are mapping out these areas as they have mapped the Amazon, Antarctica,
the Sahara, etc. But at least I’ll have a head start. And when the cameras come, I’ll
keep going north.
Mae, I have to admit that you and yours have won. It’s pretty much over, and now I
know that. But before that pitch session, I held out some hope that the madness was
limited to
your own company, to the brainwashed thousands who work for you or the millions who
worship around the golden calf that is the Circle. I held out hope that there were
those who would rise up against you people. Or that a new generation would see all
this as ludicrous, oppressive, utterly out of control.
Mae checked her wrist. There were already four new Mercer-hating clubs online. Someone
offered to erase his bank account.
Just say the word
, the message read.
But now I know that even if someone were to strike you down, if the Circle ended tomorrow,
something worse would probably take its place. There are a thousand more Wise Men
out there, people with ever-more radical ideas about the criminality of privacy. Every
time I think it can’t get worse, I see some nineteen-year-old whose ideas make the
Circle seem like some ACLUtopia. And you people (and I know now that
you
people are
most
people) are impossible to scare. No amount of surveillance causes the least concern
or provokes any resistance.
It’s one thing to want to measure yourself, Mae—you and your bracelets. I can accept
you and yours tracking your own movements, recording everything you do, collecting
data on yourself in the interest of … Well, whatever it is you’re trying to do. But
it’s not enough, is it? You don’t want just
your
data, you need
mine
. You’re not complete without it. It’s a sickness.
So I’m gone. By the time you read this, I’ll be off the grid, and I expect that others
will join me. In fact, I
know
others will join me. We’ll be living underground, and in the desert, in the
woods. We’ll be like refugees, or hermits, some unfortunate but necessary combination
of the two. Because this is what we are.
I expect this is some second great schism, where two humanities will live, apart but
parallel. There will be those who live under the surveillance dome you’re helping
to create, and those who live, or try to live, apart from it. I’m scared to death
for us all.
Mercer
She’d read the note on camera, and she knew that her viewers were finding it as bizarre
and hilarious as she had. The comments were popping, and there were some good ones.
Now the Sasquatch will return to his natural habitat!
and
Good riddance, Bigfoot
. But Mae was so entertained by it that she sought out Francis, who, by the time they
saw each other, had already seen the note transcribed and posted onto a half-dozen
sub-sites; one watcher in Missoula had already read it while wearing a powdered wig,
the background filled with faux-patriotic music. That video had been seen three million
times. Mae laughed, watching it twice herself, but found she felt for Mercer. He was
stubborn, but he was not stupid. He was not beyond hope. He was not beyond convincing.
The next day, Annie left her another paper note, and again they planned to meet in
their adjoining stalls. Mae only hoped that since the second round of major revelations,
Annie had found a way to contextualize it. Mae saw the tip of Annie’s shoe under the
next stall. She turned off her audio.
Annie’s voice was rough.
“You heard it got worse, right?”
“I did hear something. Have you been crying? Annie—”
“Mae, I don’t think I can handle this. I mean, it was one thing to know about the
ancestors in jolly Olde. But there was a part of me that was thinking, you know, that’s
fine, my people came to North America, started anew, put all that in the past. But
shit, Mae, knowing that they were slave owners
here
, too? I mean, that is fucking stupid. What kind of people am I from? It has to be
some disease in me, too.”
“Annie. You can’t think about this.”
“Of course I can. I can’t think of anything else—”
“Okay. Fine. But first, calm down. And second, you can’t take it personally. You have
to separate yourself from it. You have to see it a bit more abstractly.”
“And I’ve been getting all this crazy hate mail. I got six messages this morning from
people calling me Massa Annie. Half the people of color I hired over the years are
now suspicious of me. Like I’m some genetically pure intergenerational slave owner!
Now I can’t handle having Vickie work for me. I’m letting her go tomorrow.”
“Annie, you know how crazy this all sounds? I mean, besides, are you sure your ancestors
here
had black slaves? The slaves weren’t Irish here, too?”
Annie sighed loudly.
“No. No. My people went from owning Irish people to owning African people. How’s that?
Couldn’t keep my people from owning people. You also saw that they fought for the
Confederate side in the Civil War?”
“I saw that, but there’s millions of people whose ancestors fought for the South.
The country was at war, half and half.”
“Not
my
half. I mean, do you
know
the chaos this is wreaking on my family?”
“But they never took all this family heritage stuff seriously, did they?”
“Not when they assumed we were
blue
bloods, Mae! Not when they thought we were
Mayflower
people with this unimpeachable lineage! Now they take it
really
fucking seriously. My mom hasn’t left the house in two days. I don’t want to know
what they find next.”
What they found next, two days later, was far worse. Mae didn’t know, ahead of time,
precisely what it was, but she did know that Annie knew, and that Annie had sent a
very strange zing out into the world. It said
Actually, I don’t know if we should know everything
. When they met in the stalls, Mae couldn’t believe Annie’s fingers had actually typed
that sentence. The Circle couldn’t delete it, of course, but someone—Mae hoped it
was Annie—had amended it to say
We shouldn’t know everything—without the proper storage ready. You don’t want to lose
it!
“Of course I sent it,” Annie said. “The first one anyway.”
Mae had held out hope that it was some terrible glitch.
“How could you have sent that?”
“It’s what I believe, Mae. You have no idea.”
“I
know
I don’t. What idea do you have? You know what kind of shit you’re in? How can you
of all people espouse an idea like that? You’re the poster child for open access to
the past and now you’re saying … What are you saying, anyway?”
“Oh fuck, I don’t know. I just know I’m done. I need to shut it down.”
“Shut what down?”
“PastPerfect. Anything like it.”
“You know you can’t.”
“I’m planning to try.”
“You must
already
be in deep shit.”
“I am. But the Wise Men owe me this one favor. I can’t handle this. I mean, they’ve
already quote-unquote relieved me of some of my duties. Whatever. I don’t even care.
But if they don’t shut it down I’ll go into some kind of coma. I already feel like
I can barely stand or breathe.”
They sat in silence for a moment. Mae wondered if she shouldn’t leave. Annie was losing
her hold on something very central about herself; she felt volatile, capable of rash
and irrevocable acts. Talking to her, at all, was a risk.
Now she heard Annie gasping.
“Annie. Breathe.”
“I just told you I can’t. I haven’t slept in two days.”
“So what happened?” Mae asked.
“Oh fuck, everything. Nothing. They found some weird stuff with my parents. I mean,
a lot of weird stuff.”
“When does it go live?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Okay. Maybe it’s not as bad as you think.”
“It’s so much worse than you can imagine.”
“Tell me. I bet it’s fine.”
“It’s not
fine
, Mae. It’s anything but
fine
. The first thing is that I found out my dad and mom had some kind of open marriage
or something. I haven’t even asked them about it. But there are photos and
video of them with all kinds of other people. I mean, like, serial adultery on both
sides. Is that
fine
?”