The Circle (55 page)

“I think I need to go,” she said, and stepped toward the stairs. “I feel like this
is some horrific prank.”

“Mae, think about it. Here’s my license.” He handed her his driver’s license. It showed
a clean-shaven, dark-haired man with glasses who looked more or less like what she
remembered Ty looked like, the Ty from the video feeds, the old photos, the portrait
in oil outside Bailey’s library. The name read Tyson Matthew Gospodinov. “Look at
me. No resemblance?” He retreated to the cave-within-a-cave they’d shared and returned
with a pair of glasses. “See?” he said. “Now it’s obvious, right?” As if answering
Mae’s next question, he said, “I’ve always been a very average-looking guy. You know
this. And then I get rid of the glasses, the hoodies. I change my look, the way I
move. But most importantly, my hair went grey. And why do you think that happened?”

“I have no idea,” Mae said.

Ty swept his arms around, encompassing everything around them,
the vast campus above. “All this. The fucking shark that eats the world.”

“Do Bailey and Stenton know you’re going around with some other name?” Mae asked.

“Of course. Yes. They expect me to be here. I’m not technically allowed to leave campus.
As long as I’m here, they’re happy.”

“Does Annie know?”

“No.”

“So I’m—”

“You’re the third person who knows.”

“And you’re telling me why?”

“Because you have great influence here, and because you have to help. You’re the only
one who can slow all this down.”

“Slow what down? The company you created?”

“Mae, I didn’t intend any of this to happen. And it’s moving too fast. This idea of
Completion, it’s far beyond what I had in mind when I started all this, and it’s far
beyond what’s right. It has to be brought back into some kind of balance.”

“First of all, I don’t agree. Secondly, I can’t help.”

“Mae, the Circle can’t close.”

“What are you talking about? How can you say this now? If you’re Ty, most of this
was your idea.”

“No. No. I was trying to make the web more civil. I was trying to make it more elegant.
I got rid of anonymity. I combined a thousand disparate elements into one unified
system. But I didn’t picture a world where Circle membership was mandatory, where
all government and all life was channeled through one network—”

“I’m leaving,” Mae said, and turned. “And I don’t see why you just
don’t leave, too. Leave everything. If you don’t believe in all this, then leave.
Go to the woods.”

“That didn’t work for Mercer, did it?”

“Fuck you.”

“Sorry. I’m sorry. But he’s why I contacted you now. Don’t you see that’s just one
of the consequences of all this? There will be more Mercers. So many more. So many
people who don’t want to be found but who will be. So many people who wanted no part
of all this. That’s what’s new. There used to be the option of opting out. But now
that’s over. Completion is the end. We’re closing the circle around everyone—it’s
a totalitarian nightmare.”

“And it’s my fault?”

“No, no. Not at all. But you’re now the ambassador. You’re the face of it. The benign,
friendly face of it all. And the closing of the Circle—it’s what you and your friend
Francis made possible. Your mandatory Circle account idea, and his chip. TruYouth?
It’s sick, Mae. Don’t you see? All the kids get a chip embedded in them, for safety,
when they’re infants. And yes, it’ll save lives. But then, what, you think they suddenly
remove them when they’re eighteen? No. In the interest of education and safety, everything
they’ve done will be recorded, tracked, logged, analyzed—it’s permanent. Then, when
they’re old enough to vote, to participate, their membership is mandatory. That’s
where the Circle closes. Everyone will be tracked, cradle to grave, with no possibility
of escape.”

“You really sound like Mercer now. This kind of paranoia—”

“But I know more than Mercer. Don’t you think if someone like me, someone who invented
most of this shit, is scared, don’t you think you should be scared, too?”

“No. I think you lost a step.”

“Mae, so many of the things I invented I honestly did for fun, out of some perverse
game of whether or not they’d work, whether people would use them. I mean, it was
like setting up a guillotine in the public square. You don’t expect a thousand people
to line up to put their heads in it.”

“Is that how you see this?”

“No, sorry. That’s a bad comparison. But some of the things we did, I just—I did just
to see if anyone would actually use them, would acquiesce. When they did buy in, half
the time I couldn’t believe it. And then it was too late. There was Bailey and Stenton
and the IPO. And then it was just too fast, and there was enough money to make any
dumb idea real. Mae, I want you to imagine where all this is going.”

“I know where it’s going.”

“Mae, close your eyes.”

“No.”

“Mae, please. Close your eyes.”

She closed her eyes.

“I want you to connect these dots and see if you see what I see. Picture this. The
Circle has been devouring all competitors for years, correct? It only makes the company
stronger. Already, 90 percent of the world’s searches go through the Circle. Without
competitors, this will increase. Soon it’ll be nearly 100 percent. Now, you and I
both know that if you can control the flow of information, you can control everything.
You can control most of what anyone sees and knows. If you want to bury some piece
of information, permanently, that’s two seconds’ work. If you want to ruin anyone,
that’s five minutes’ work.
How can anyone rise up against the Circle if they control all the information and
accesss to it? They want everyone to have a Circle account, and they’re well on their
way to making it illegal not to. What happens then? What happens when they control
all searches, and have full access to all data about every person? When they know
every move everyone makes? If all monetary transactions, all health and DNA information,
every piece of one’s life, good or bad, when every word uttered flows through one
channel?”

“But there are a thousand protections to prevent all of this. It’s just not possible.
I mean, governments will make sure—”

“Governments who are transparent? Legislators who owe their reputations to the Circle?
Who could be ruined the moment they speak out? What do you think happened to Williamson?
Remember her? She threatens the Circle monopoly and, surprise, the feds find incriminating
stuff on her computer. You think that’s a coincidence? That’s about the hundredth
person Stenton’s done that to. Mae, once the Circle’s complete, that’s it. And you
helped complete it. This democracy thing, or Demoxie, whatever it is, good god. Under
the guise of having every voice heard, you create mob rule, a filterless society where
secrets are crimes. It’s brilliant, Mae. I mean, you are brilliant. You’re what Stenton
and Bailey have been hoping for from the start.”

“But Bailey—”

“Bailey believes that life will be better, will be perfect, when everyone has unfettered
access to everyone and everything they know. He genuinely believes that the answers
to every life question can be found among other people. He truly believes that openness,
that complete and uninterrupted access among all humans will help the world. That
this is what the world’s been waiting for, the moment when
every soul is connected. This is his rapture, Mae! Don’t you see how extreme that
view is? His idea is radical, and in another era would have been a fringe notion espoused
by an eccentric adjunct professor somewhere: that all information, personal or not,
should be known by all. Knowledge is property and no one can own it. Infocommunism.
And he’s entitled to that opinion. But paired with ruthless capitalistic ambition—”

“So it’s Stenton?”

“Stenton professionalized our idealism, monetized our utopia. He’s the one who saw
the connection between our work and politics, and between politics and control. Public-private
leads to private-private, and soon you have the Circle running most or even all government
services, with incredible private-sector efficiency and an insatiable appetite. Everyone
becomes a citizen of the Circle.”

“And that’s so bad? If everyone has equal access to services, to information, we finally
have a chance at equality. No information should cost anything. There should be no
barriers to knowing everything, to accessing all—”

“And if everyone’s tracked—”

“Then there’s no crime. No murder, no kidnapping and rape. No kids ever victimized
again. No more missing persons. I mean, that alone—”

“But don’t you see what happened to your friend Mercer? He was pursued to the ends
of the earth and now he’s gone.”

“But this is just the pivot of history. Have you talked to Bailey about this? I mean,
during any major human turning point, there’s upheaval. Some get left behind, some
choose
to be left behind.”

“So you think everyone should be tracked, should be watched.”

“I think everything and every
one
should be seen. And to be seen, we need to be watched. The two go hand in hand.”

“But who wants to be watched all the time?”

“I do. I
want
to be seen. I want proof I existed.”

“Mae.”

“Most people do. Most people would trade everything they know, every
one
they know—they’d trade it all to know they’ve been seen, and acknowledged, that they
might even be remembered. We all know we die. We all know the world is too big for
us to be significant. So all we have is the hope of being seen, or heard, even for
a moment.”

“But Mae. We saw every creature in that tank, didn’t we? We saw them devoured by a
beast that turned them to ash. Don’t you see that everything that goes into that tank,
with that beast, with
this
beast, will meet the same fate?”

“So what exactly do you want from me?”

“When you have the maximum amount of viewers, I want you to read this statement.”
He handed Mae a piece of paper, on which he’d written, in crude all capitals, a list
of assertions under the headline “The Rights of Humans in a Digital Age.” Mae scanned
it, catching passages: “We must all have the right to anonymity.” “Not every human
activity can be measured.” “The ceaseless pursuit of data to quantify the value of
any endeavor is catastrophic to true understanding.” “The barrier between public and
private must remain unbreachable.” At the end she found one line, written in red ink:
“We must all have the right to disappear.”

“So you want me to read all this to the watchers?”

“Yes,” Kalden said, his eyes wild.

“And then what?”

“I have a series of steps that we can take together that can begin to take all this
apart. I know everything that’s ever happened here, Mae, and there’s plenty that’s
gone on that would convince anyone, no matter how blind, that the Circle needs to
be dismantled. I know I can do it. I’m the only one who can do it, but I need your
help.”

“And then what?”

“Then you and I go somewhere. I have so many ideas. We’ll vanish. We can hike through
Tibet. We can bike through the Mongolian steppe. We can sail around the world in a
boat we built ourselves.”

Mae pictured all this. She pictured the Circle being taken apart, sold off amid scandal,
thirteen thousand people out of jobs, the campus overtaken, broken up, turned into
a college or mall or something worse. And finally she pictured life on a boat with
this man, sailing the world, untethered, but when she tried to, she saw, instead,
the couple on the barge she’d met months ago on the bay. Out there, alone, living
under a tarp, drinking wine from paper cups, naming seals, reminiscing about island
fires.

At that moment, Mae knew what she needed to do.

“Kalden, are you sure we’re not being heard?”

“Of course not.”

“Okay, good. Good. I see everything clearly now.”

T
O HAVE GOTTEN
so close to apocalypse—it rattled her still. Yes, Mae had averted it, she’d been
braver than she thought possible, but her nerves, these many months later, were still
frayed. What if Kalden hadn’t reached out to her when he did? What if he hadn’t trusted
her? What if he’d taken matters into his own hands, or worse, entrusted his secret
to someone else? Someone without her integrity? Without her strength, her resolve,
her loyalty?

In the quiet of the clinic, sitting next to Annie, Mae’s mind wandered. There was
serenity here, with the rhythmic hush of the respirator, the occasional door opening
or closing, the hum of the machines that kept Annie alive. She’d collapsed at her
desk, was found on the floor, catatonic, and was rushed here, where the care surpassed
what she could have received anywhere else. Since then, she’d stabilized, and the
prognosis was strong. The cause of the coma was still a subject of some debate, Dr.
Villalobos had said, but most likely, it was caused by stress, or shock, or simple
exhaustion. The Circle doctors were confident Annie would emerge from it, as were
a thousand doctors worldwide who had watched her vitals, encouraged by the
frequent flittering of her eyelashes, the occasional twitch of a finger. Next to her
EKG, there was a screen with an ever-lengthening string of good wishes from fellow
humans from all over the world, most or all of whom, Mae thought wistfully, Annie
would never know.

Mae looked at her friend, at her unchanging face, her glistening skin, the ribbed
tube emerging from her mouth. She looked wonderfully peaceful, sleeping a restful
sleep, and for a brief moment Mae felt a twinge of envy. She wondered what Annie was
thinking. Doctors had said that she was likely dreaming; they’d been measuring steady
brain activity during the coma, but what precisely was happening in her mind was unknown
to all, and Mae couldn’t help feeling some annoyance about this. There was a monitor
visible from where Mae sat, a real-time picture of Annie’s mind, bursts of color appearing
periodically, implying that extraordinary things were happening in there. But what
was she thinking?