by Dave Eggers
And she did not expect to see it again. How often, outside of the nineteenth century, outside a general store of the nineteenth century, does one encounter burlap? Mae assumed she never would, but then here it was, all around her in this new Circle workspace, and looking at it, smelling its musty smell, her eyes welled up. “Fucking burlap,” she mumbled to herself.
Behind her, she heard a sigh, then a voice: “Now I’m thinking this wasn’t such a good idea.”
Mae turned and found Annie, her hands in fists at her sides, posing like a pouting child. “Fucking burlap,” Annie said, imitating her pout, then burst out laughing. When she was done, she managed, “That was incredible. Thank you so much for that, Mae. I knew you’d hate it, but I wanted to see just how much. I’m sorry you almost cried. Jesus.”
Now Mae looked to Renata, whose hands were raised high in surrender. “Not my idea!” she said. “Annie put me up to it! Don’t hate me!”
Annie sighed with satisfaction. “I had to actually buy that cubicle from Walmart. And the computer! That took me ages to find online. I thought we could just bring that kind of stuff up from the basement or something, but we honestly had nothing on the entire campus ugly and old enough. Oh god, you should have seen your face.”
Mae’s heart was pounding. “You’re such a sicko.”
Annie feigned confusion. “Me? I’m not sick. I’m awesome.”
“I can’t believe you went to that much trouble to upset me.”
“Well, I did. That’s how I got to where I am now. It’s all about planning and it’s all about follow-through.” She gave Mae a salesman’s wink and Mae couldn’t help but laugh. Annie was a lunatic. “Now let’s go. I’m giving you the full tour.”
As Mae followed her, she had to remind herself that Annie had not always been a senior executive at a company like the Circle. There was a time, only four years ago, when Annie was a college student who wore men’s flannel housepants to class, to dinner, on casual dates. Annie was what one of her boyfriends, and there were many, always monogamous, always decent, called a doofus. But she could afford to be. She came from money, generations of money, and was very cute, dimpled and long-lashed, with hair so blond it could only be real. She was known by all as effervescent, seemed incapable of letting anything bother her for more than a few moments. But she was also a doofus. She was gangly, and used her hands wildly, dangerously, when she spoke, and was given to bizarre conversational tangents and strange obsessions—caves, amateur perfumery, doo-wop music. She was friendly with every one of her exes, with every hookup, with every professor (she knew them all personally and sent them gifts). She had been involved in, or ran, most or all of the clubs and causes in college, and yet she’d found time to be committed to her coursework—to everything, really—while also, at any party, being the most likely to embarrass herself to loosen everyone up, the last to leave. The one rational explanation for all this would have been that she did not sleep, but this was not the case. She slept decadently, eight to ten hours a day, could sleep anywhere—on a three-minute car ride, in the filthy booth of an off-campus diner, on anyone’s couch, at any time.
Mae knew this firsthand, having been something of a chauffeur to Annie on long rides, throughout Minnesota and Wisconsin and Iowa, to countless and largely meaningless cross-country contests. Mae had gotten a partial scholarship to run at Carleton, and that’s where she met Annie, who was effortlessly good, two years older, but was only intermittently concerned with whether she, or the team, won or lost. One meet Annie would be deep in it, taunting the opponents, insulting their uniforms or SATs, and the next she’d be wholly uninterested in the outcome but happy to be along for the ride. It was on the long rides, in Annie’s car—which she preferred Mae to drive—that Annie would put her bare feet up or out the window, and would riff on the passing scenery, and would speculate, for hours, on what went on in the bedroom of their coaches, a married couple with matching, almost military, haircuts. Mae laughed at everything Annie said, and it kept Mae’s mind off the meets, where she, unlike Annie, had to win, or at least do well, to justify the subsidy the college had provided her. They would invariably arrive minutes before the meet, with Annie having forgotten what race she was meant to run, or whether she really wanted to run at all.
And so how was this possible, that this scattershot and ridiculous person, who still carried a piece of her childhood blanket around in her pocket, had risen so quickly and high through the Circle? Now she was part of the forty most crucial minds at the company—the Gang of 40—privy to its most secret plans and data. That she could push through the hiring of Mae without breaking a sweat? That she could set it all up within weeks of Mae finally swallowing all pride and making the ask? It was a testament to Annie’s inner will, some mysterious and core sense of destiny. Outwardly, Annie showed no signs of garish ambition, but Mae was sure that there was something within Annie that insisted upon this, that she would have been here, in this position, no matter where she’d come from. If she’d grown up in the Siberian tundra, born blind to shepherds, she still would have arrived here, now.
“Thanks Annie,” she heard herself say.
They’d walked past a few conference rooms and lounges and were passing through the company’s new gallery, where a half-dozen Basquiats hung, just acquired from a near-broke museum in Miami.
“Whatever,” Annie said. “And I’m sorry you’re in Customer Experience. I know that sounds shitty, but I will have you know that about half the company’s senior people started there. Do you believe me?”
“I do.”
“Good, because it’s true.”
They left the gallery and entered the second-floor cafeteria—“The Glass Eatery, I know it’s such a terrible name,” Annie said—designed such that diners ate at nine different levels, all of the floors and walls glass. At first glance, it looked like a hundred people were eating in mid-air.
They moved through the Borrow Room, where anything from bicycles to telescopes to hang gliders were loaned, for free, to anyone on staff, and onto the aquarium, a project championed by one of the founders. They stood before a display, as tall as themselves, where jellyfish, ghostly and slow, rose and fell with no apparent pattern or reason.
“I’ll be watching you,” Annie said, “and every time you do something great I’ll be making sure everyone knows about it so you won’t have to stay there too long. People move up here pretty reliably, and as you know we hire almost exclusively from within. So just do well and keep your head down and you’ll be shocked at how quickly you’ll be out of Customer Experience and into something juicy.”
Mae looked into Annie’s eyes, bright in the aquarium light. “Don’t worry. I’m happy to be anywhere here.”
“Better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than in the middle of some ladder you don’t, right? Some shitty-ass ladder made of shit?”
Mae laughed. It was the shock of hearing such filth coming from such a sweet face. “Did you always curse this much? I don’t remember that part of you.”
“I do it when I’m tired, which is pretty much always.”
“You used to be such a sweet girl.”
“Sorry. I’m fucking sorry Mae! Jesus fucking Christ, Mae! Okay. Let’s see more stuff. The kennel!”
“Are we working at all today?” Mae asked.
“Working? This is working. This is what you’re tasked with doing the first day: getting to know the place, the people, getting acclimated. You know how when you put new wood floors into your house—”
“No, I don’t.”
“Well, when you do, you first have to let them sit there for ten days, to get the wood acclimated. Then you do the installation.”
“So in this analogy, I’m the wood?”
“You are the wood.”
“And then I’ll be installed.”
“Yes, we will then install you. We’ll hammer you with ten thousands tiny nails. You’ll love it.”
They visited the kennel, a brainc
hild of Annie, whose dog, Dr. Kinsmann, had just passed on, but who had spent a few very happy years here, never far from his owner. Why should thousands of employees all leave their dogs at home when they could be brought here, to be around people, and other dogs, and be cared for and not alone? That had been Annie’s logic, quickly embraced and now considered visionary. And they saw the nightclub—often used during the day for something called ecstatic dancing, a great workout, Annie said—and they saw the large outdoor amphitheater, and the small indoor theater—“there are about ten comedy improv groups here”—and after they saw all that, there was lunch in the larger, first-floor cafeteria where, in the corner, on a small stage, there was a man, playing a guitar, who looked like an aging singer-songwriter Mae’s parents listened to.
“Is that …?”
“It is,” Annie said, not breaking her stride, “There’s someone every day. Musicians, comedians, writers. That’s Bailey’s passion project, to bring them here to get some exposure, especially given how rough it is out there for them.”
“I knew they came sometimes, but you’re saying it’s every day?”
“We book them a year ahead. We have to fight them off.”
The singer-songwriter was singing passionately, his head tilted, hair covering his eyes, his fingers strumming feverishly, but the vast majority of the cafeteria was paying little to no attention.
“I can’t imagine the budget for that,” Mae said.
“Oh god, we don’t pay them. Oh wait, you should meet this guy.”
Annie stopped a man named Vipul, who, Annie said, would soon be reinventing all of television, a medium stuck more than any other in the twentieth century.
“Try nineteenth,” he said, with a slight Indian accent, his English precise and lofty. “It’s the last place where customers do not, ever, get what they want. The last vestige of feudal arrangements between maker and viewer. We are vassals no longer!” he said, and soon excused himself.
“That guy is on another level,” Annie said as they made their way through the cafeteria. They stopped at five or six other tables, meeting fascinating people, every one of them working on something Annie deemed world-rocking or life-changing or fifty years ahead of anyone else. The range of the work being done was startling. They met a pair of women working on a submersible exploration craft that would make the Marianas Trench mysterious no more. “They’ll map it like Manhattan,” Annie said, and the two women did not argue the hyperbole. They stopped at a table where a trio of young men were looking at a screen, embedded into the table, displaying 3-D drawings of a new kind of low-cost housing, to be easily adopted throughout the developing world.
Annie grabbed Mae’s hand and pulled her toward the exit. “Now we’re seeing the Ochre Library. You heard of it?”
Mae hadn’t, but didn’t want to commit to that answer.
Annie gave her a conspiratorial look. “You’re not supposed to see it, but I say we go.”
They got into an elevator of plexiglass and neon and rose through the atrium, every floor and office visible as they climbed five floors. “I can’t see how stuff like that works into the bottom line here,” Mae said.
“Oh god, I don’t know, either. But it’s not just about money here, as I’m guessing you know. There’s enough revenue to support the passions of the community. Those guys working on the sustainable housing, they were programmers, but a couple of them had studied architecture. So they write up a proposal, and the Wise Men went nuts for it. Especially Bailey. He just loves enabling the curiosity of great young minds. And his library’s insane. This is the floor.”
They stepped out of the elevator and into a long hallway, this one appointed in deep cherry and walnut, a series of compact chandeliers emitting a calm amber light.
“Old school,” Mae noted.
“You know about Bailey, right? He loves this ancient shit. Mahogany, brass, stained glass. That’s his aesthetic. He gets overruled in the rest of the buildings, but here he has his way. Check this out.”
Annie stopped at a large painting, a portrait of the Three Wise Men. “Hideous, right?” she said.
The painting was awkward, the kind of thing a high school artist might produce. In it, the three men, the founders of the company, were arranged in a pyramid, each of them dressed in their best-known clothes, wearing expressions that spoke, cartoonishly, of their personalities. Ty Gospodinov, the Circle’s boy-wonder visionary, was wearing nondescript glasses and an enormous hoodie, staring leftward and smiling; he seemed to be enjoying some moment, alone, tuned into some distant frequency. People said he was borderline Asperger’s, and the picture seemed intent on underscoring the point. With his dark unkempt hair, his unlined face, he looked no more than twenty-five.
“Ty looks checked out, right?” Annie said. “But he couldn’t be. None of us would be here if he wasn’t a fucking brilliant management master, too. I should explain the dynamic. You’ll be moving up quickly so I’ll lay it out.”
Ty, born Tyler Alexander Gospodinov, was the first Wise Man, Annie explained, and everyone always just called him Ty.
“I know this,” Mae said.
“Don’t stop me now. I’m giving you the same spiel I have to give to heads of state.”
“Okay.”
Annie continued.
Ty realized he was, at best, socially awkward, and at worst an utter interpersonal disaster. So, just six months before the company’s IPO, he made a very wise and profitable decision: he hired the other two Wise Men, Eamon Bailey and Tom Stenton. The move assuaged the fears of all investors and ultimately tripled the company’s valuation. The IPO raised $3 billion, unprecedented but not unexpected, and with all monetary concerns behind him, and with Stenton and Bailey aboard, Ty was free to float, to hide, to disappear. With every successive month, he was seen less and less around campus and in the media. He became more reclusive, and the aura around him, intentionally or not, only grew. Watchers of the Circle wondered, Where is Ty and what is he planning? These plans were kept unknown until they were revealed, and with each successive innovation brought forth by the Circle, it became less clear which had originated from Ty himself and which were the products of the increasingly vast group of inventors, the best in the world, who were now in the company fold.
Most observers assumed he was still involved, and some insisted that his fingerprints, his knack for solutions global and elegant and infinitely scalable, were on every major Circle innovation. He had founded the company after a year in college, with no particular business acumen or measurable goals. “We used to call him Niagara,” his roommate said in one of the first articles about him. “The ideas just come like that, a million flowing out of his head, every second of every day, never-ending and overwhelming.”
Ty had devised the initial system, the Unified Operating System, which combined everything online that had heretofore been separate and sloppy—users’ social media profiles, their payment systems, their various passwords, their email accounts, user names, preferences, every last tool and manifestation of their interests. The old way—a new transaction, a new system, for every site, for every purchase—it was like getting into a different car to run any one kind of errand. “You shouldn’t have to have eighty-seven different cars,” he’d said, later, after his system had overtaken the web and the world.
Instead, he put all of it, all of every user’s needs and tools, into one pot and invented TruYou—one account, one identity, one password, one payment system, per person. There were no more passwords, no multiple identities. Your devices knew who you were, and your one identity—the TruYou, unbendable and unmaskable—was the person paying, signing up, responding, viewing and reviewing, seeing and being seen. You had to use your real name, and this was tied to your credit cards, your bank, and thus paying for anything was simple. One button for the rest of your life online.
To use any of the Circle’s tools, and they were the best tools, the most dominant and ubiquitous and free, you had to do so as yourself, a
s your actual self, as your TruYou. The era of false identities, identity theft, multiple user names, complicated passwords and payment systems was over. Anytime you wanted to see anything, use anything, comment on anything or buy anything, it was one button, one account, everything tied together and trackable and simple, all of it operable via mobile or laptop, tablet or retinal. Once you had a single account, it carried you through every corner of the web, every portal, every pay site, everything you wanted to do.
TruYou changed the internet, in toto, within a year. Though some sites were resistant at first, and free-internet advocates shouted about the right to be anonymous online, the TruYou wave was tidal and crushed all meaningful opposition. It started with the commerce sites. Why would any non-porn site want anonymous users when they could know exactly who had come through the door? Overnight, all comment boards became civil, all posters held accountable. The trolls, who had more or less overtaken the internet, were driven back into the darkness.
And those who wanted or needed to track the movements of consumers online had found their Valhalla: the actual buying habits of actual people were now eminently mappable and measurable, and the marketing to those actual people could be done with surgical precision. Most TruYou users, most internet users who simply wanted simplicity, efficiency, a clean and streamlined experience, were thrilled with the results. No longer did they have to memorize twelve identities and passwords; no longer did they have to tolerate the madness and rage of the anonymous hordes; no longer did they have to put up with buckshot marketing that guessed, at best, within a mile of their desires. Now the messages they did get were focused and accurate and, most of the time, even welcome.