The Circle (51 page)

“Okay, okay,” she said, finally, raising her hands, urging the audience into their
seats. “Today we’re going to demonstrate the ultimate search tool. You’ve heard about
SoulSearch, maybe a rumor here and there, and now we’re putting it to the test, in
front of the entire Circle audience here and globally. Do you feel ready?”

The crowd cheered its answer.

“What you’re about to see is completely spontaneous and unrehearsed. Even I don’t
know who we’ll be searching for today. He or she will be chosen at random from a database
of known fugitives worldwide.”

Onscreen, a giant digital globe spun.

“As you know, much of what we do here at the Circle is using social media to create
a safer and saner world. This has already been achieved in myriad ways, of course.
Our WeaponSensor program, for example, recently went live, and registers the entry
of any gun into any building, provoking an alarm that alerts all residents and the
local police. That’s been beta-tested in two neighborhoods in Cleveland for the last
five weeks, and there’s been a 57 percent drop in gun crimes. Not bad, right?”

Mae paused for applause, feeling very comfortable, and knowing what she was about
to present would change the world, immediately and permanently.

“Fine job so far,” said the voice in her ear. It was Stenton. He’d let her know he
would be Additional Guidance today. SoulSearch was a particular interest of his, and
he wanted to be present to guide its introduction.

Mae took a breath.

“But one of the strangest facets of our world is how fugitives from justice can hide
in a world as interconnected as ours. It took us ten years to find Osama bin Laden.
D. B. Cooper, the infamous thief who leapt from an airplane with a suitcase of money,
remains on the lam, decades after his escape. But this kind of thing should end now.
And I believe it will, now.”

A silhouette appeared behind her. It was the shape of a human, torso and up, with
the familiar mug-shot measurements in the background.

“In seconds, the computer will select, at random, a fugitive from justice. I don’t
know who it will be. No one does. Whoever it is, though, he’s been proven a menace
to our global community, and our
assertion is that whoever he or she is, SoulSearch will locate him or her within twenty
minutes. Ready?”

Murmurs filled the room, followed by scattered applause.

“Good,” Mae said. “Let’s select that fugitive.”

Pixel by pixel, the silhouette slowly became an actual and specific person, and when
the selection was finished, a face had emerged, and Mae was shocked to find it was
a woman. A hard-looking face, squinting into a police camera. Something about this
woman, her small eyes and straight mouth, brought to mind the photography of Dorothea
Lange—those sun-scarred faces of the Dust Bowl. But as the profile data appeared beneath
this photo, Mae realized the woman was British and very much alive. She scanned the
information onscreen and focused the audience on the essentials.

“Okay. This is Fiona Highbridge. Forty-four years old. Born in Manchester, England.
She was convicted of triple murder in 2002. She locked her three children in a closet
and went to Spain for a month. They all starved. They were all under five. She was
sent to prison in England but escaped, with the help of a guard who she apparently
seduced. It’s been a decade since anyone’s seen her, and police have all but given
up on finding her. But I believe we can, now that we have the tools and the participation
of the Circle.”

“Good,” Stenton said into Mae’s ear. “Let’s focus now on the UK.”

“As you all know, yesterday we alerted all three billion Circle users that today we’d
have a world-changing announcement. So we currently have this many people watching
the live feed.” Mae turned back to the screen and watched a counter tick up to 1,109,001,887.
“Okay, over a billion people are watching. And now let’s see how many we have in the
UK.” A second counter spun, and landed on
14,028,981. “All right. The information we have says that her passport was revoked
years ago, so Fiona is probably still in the UK. Do you all think fourteen million
Brits and a billion global participants can find Fiona Highbridge in twenty minutes?”

The audience roared, but Mae didn’t, in fact, know if it would work. She wouldn’t
have been surprised, actually, if it didn’t—or if it took thirty minutes, an hour.
But then again, there was always something unexpected, something miraculous about
the outcomes when the full power of the Circle’s users was brought to bear. She was
sure it would be done by the end of lunch.

“Okay, everyone ready? Let’s bring up the clock.” A giant six-digit timer appeared
in the corner of the screen, indicating hours, minutes, and seconds.

“Let me show you some of the groups we have working together on this. Let’s see the
University of East Anglia.” A feed showing many hundreds of students, in a large auditorium,
appeared. They cheered. “Let’s see the city of Leeds.” Now a shot of a public square,
full of people, bundled up in what appeared to be cold and blustery weather. “We have
dozens of groups all over the country, who will be banding together, in addition to
the power of the network as a whole. Everyone ready?” The Manchester crowd raised
their hands and cheered, and the students of East Anglia did, too.

“Good,” Mae said. “Now on your mark, get set. Go.”

Mae drew her hand down, next to the photo of Fiona Highbridge, a series of columns
showed the comment feed, the highest-ranked appearing at the top. The most popular
thus far was from a man named Simon Hensley, from Brighton:
Are we sure we want to find this hag? She looks like the Scarecrow from Wizard of
Oz
.

There were laughs throughout the auditorium.

“Okay. Time to get serious,” Mae said.

Another column featured users’ own photos, posted according to relevance. Within three
minutes, there were 201 photos posted, most of them close corollaries to the face
of Fiona Highbridge. On screen, votes were tallying, indicating which of the photos
were most likely her. In four minutes it was down to five prime candidates. One was
in Bend, Oregon. Another was in Banff, Canada. Another in Glasgow. Then something
magical happened, something only possible when the full Circle was working toward
a single goal: two of the photos, the crowd realized, were taken in the same town:
Carmarthen, in Wales. Both looked like the same woman, and both looked exactly like
Fiona Highbridge.

In another ninety seconds someone identified this woman. She was known as Fatima Hilensky,
which the crowd voted was a promising indicator. Would someone trying to disappear
change their name completely, or would they feel safer with the same initials, with
a name like this—different enough to throw off any casual pursuers, but allowing her
to use a slight variation on her old signature?

Seventy-nine watchers lived in or near Carmarthen, and three of them posted messages
claiming they saw her more or less daily. This was promising enough, but then, in
a comment that quickly shot to the top with hundreds of thousands of votes, a woman,
Gretchen Karapcek, posting from her mobile phone, said she worked with the woman in
the photo, at a commercial laundry outside Swansea. The crowd urged Gretchen to find
her, there and then, and capture her by photo or video. Immediately, Gretchen turned
on the video function on her phone and—though there were still millions of people
investigating
other leads—most viewers were convinced Gretchen had the right person. Mae, and most
watchers, were riveted, watching Gretchen’s camera weave through enormous, steaming
machines, coworkers looking curiously at her as she passed quickly through the cavernous
space and ever-closer to a woman in the distance, thin and bent, feeding a bedsheet
between two massive wheels.

Mae checked the clock. Six minutes, 33 seconds. She was sure this was Fiona Highbridge.
There was something in the shape of her head, something in her mannerisms, and now,
as she raised her eyes and caught sight of Gretchen’s camera gliding toward her, a
clear recognition that something very serious was happening. It was not a look of
pure surprise or bewilderment. It was the look of an animal caught rooting through
the garbage. A feral look of guilt and recognition.

For a second, Mae held her breath, and it seemed that the woman would give up, and
would speak to the camera, admitting her crimes and acknowledging she’d been found.

Instead, she ran.

For a long moment, the holder of the camera stood, and her camera showed only Fiona
Highbridge—for there was no doubt now that it was her—as she fled quickly through
the room and up the stairs.

“Follow her!” Mae finally yelled, and Gretchen Karapcek and her camera began pursuit.
Mae worried, momentarily, that this would be some botched effort, a fugitive found
but then quickly lost by a fumbling coworker. The camera jostled wildly, up the concrete
stairs, through a cinderblock hallway, and finally approached a door, the white sky
visible through its small square window.

And when the door broke open, Mae saw, with great relief, that Fiona Highbridge was
trapped against a wall, surrounded by a dozen
people, most of them holding their phones to her, aiming them at her. There was no
possibility of escape. Her face was wild, at once terrified and defiant. She seemed
to be looking for gaps in the throng, some hole she could slip through. “Gotcha, kid-killer,”
someone in the crowd said, and Fiona Highbridge collapsed, sliding to the ground,
covering her face.

In seconds, most of the crowd’s video feeds were available on the Great Room screen,
and the audience could see a mosaic of Fiona Highbridge, her cold hard face from ten
angles, all of them confirming her guilt.

“Lynch her!” someone outside the laundry yelled.

“She must be kept safe,” Stenton hissed into Mae’s ear.

“Keep her safe,” Mae pleaded with the mob. “Has someone called the police—the constables?”

In a few seconds, sirens could be heard, and when Mae saw the two cars race across
the parking lot, she checked the time again. When the four officers reached Fiona
Highbridge and applied handcuffs to her, the clock on the Great Room screen read 10
minutes, 26 seconds.

“I guess that’s it,” Mae said, and stopped the clock.

The audience exploded with cheers, and the participants who had trapped Fiona Highbridge
were congratulated worldwide in seconds.

“Let’s cut the video feed,” Stenton said to Mae, “in the interest of allowing her
some dignity.”

Mae repeated the directive to the techs. The feeds showing Highbridge dropped out,
and the screen went black again.

“Well,” Mae said to the audience. “That was actually a lot easier than even I thought
it would be. And we only needed a few of the tools now at the world’s disposal.”

“Let’s do another!” someone yelled.

Mae smiled. “Well, we
could
,” she said, and looked to Bailey, standing in the wings. He shrugged.

“Maybe not another fugitive,” Stenton said into her earpiece. “Let’s try a regular
civilian.”

A smile overtook Mae’s face.

“Okay everyone,” she said, as she quickly found a photo on her tablet and transferred
it to the screen behind her. It was a snapshot of Mercer taken three years earlier,
just after they’d stopped dating, when they were still close, the two of them standing
at the entrance to a coastal trail they were about to hike.

She had not, before just then, once thought of using the Circle to find Mercer, but
now it seemed to make perfect sense. How better to prove to him the reach and power
of the network and the people on it? His skepticism would fall away.

“Okay,” Mae said to the audience. “Our second target today is not a fugitive from
justice, but you might say he’s a fugitive from, well, friendship.”

She smiled, acknowledging the laughter in the room.

“This is Mercer Medeiros. I haven’t seen him in a few months, and would love to see
him again. Like Fiona Highbridge, though, he’s someone who is trying not to be found.
So let’s see if we can break our previous record. Everyone ready? Let’s start the
clock.” And the clock started.

Within ninety seconds there were hundreds of posts from people who knew him—from grade
school, high school, college, work. There were even a few pictures featuring Mae,
which entertained all involved. Then, though, much to Mae’s horror, there was a yawning
gap, of four and a half minutes, when no one offered any valuable information on where
he was now. An ex-girlfriend said she, too, would like to know his whereabouts, given
he had a whole scuba apparatus that belonged to her. That was the most relevant message
for a time, but then a zing appeared from Jasper, Oregon, and was immediately voted
to the top of the scroll.

I’ve seen this guy at our local grocery. Let me check
.

And that poster, Adam Frankenthaler, got in touch with his neighbors, and quickly
there was agreement that they had all seen Mercer—in the liquor store, in the grocery,
at the library. But then there was another excruciating pause, almost two minutes,
where no one could figure out quite where he lived. The clock said 7:31.

“Okay,” Mae said. “This is where the more powerful tools come into play. Let’s check
local real estate sites for rental histories. Let’s check credit card records, phone
records, library memberships, anything he would have signed up for. Oh wait.” Mae
looked up to see two addresses had been found, both in the same tiny Oregon town.
“Do we know how we got those?” she asked, but it hardly seemed to matter. Things were
moving too quickly now.

In the next few minutes, cars converged on both addresses, their passengers filming
their arrival. One address was above a homeopathic medicine outlet in town, great
redwoods rising high above. A camera showed a hand knocking on the door, and then
peering into the window. There was no answer at first, but finally the door opened,
and the camera panned down to find a tiny boy, about five, seeing a crowd at his doorstep,
looking terrified.