The Circle

by Dave Eggers

  “Good.”

  “Oh, and when you get back to your desk, you’ll see a new screen. Every so often, one of the questions will be accompanied by an image if it’s necessary. We keep these to a minimum, though, because we know you need to concentrate.”

  When Mae got back to her desk, a new screen, her fifth, had been set up just to the right of her newbie-question screen. She had a few minutes before one o’clock, so she tested the system. The first bell rang, and she nodded. A woman’s voice, sounding like a newscaster’s, asked her, “For vacations, are you inclined toward one of relaxation, like a beach or luxury hotel, or are you inclined toward adventure, like a white-water rafting trip?”

  Mae answered “Adventure.”

  A tiny bell rang, faint and pleasant.

  “Thank you. What sort of adventure?” the voice asked.

  “White-water rafting,” Mae answered.

  Another tiny bell. Mae nodded.

  “Thank you. For white-water rafting, do you prefer a multi-day trip, with overnight camping, or a day trip?”

  Mae looked up to find the room filling with the rest of the pod, returning from lunch. It was 12:58.

  “Multi-day,” she said.

  Another bell. Mae nodded.

  “Thank you. How does a trip down the Grand Canyon sound?”

  “Smile.”

  The bell sang faintly. Mae nodded.

  “Thank you. Would you be willing to pay 1,200 dollars for a weeklong trip down the Grand Canyon?” the voice asked.

  “Meh,” Mae said, and looked up to see Jared, standing on his chair.

  “The chute is open!” he yelled.

  Almost immediately twelve customer queries appeared. Mae answered the first, got a 92, followed up, and it rose to 97. She answered the next two, for an average of 96.

  “Mae.”

  It was a woman’s voice. She looked around, thinking it might be Renata. But there was no one near her.

  “Mae.”

  Now she realized it was her own voice, the prompt she’d agreed to. It was louder than she’d expected, louder than the questions or the bell, and yet it was seductive, thrilling. She turned the volume down on the headset, and again the voice came: “Mae.”

  Now, with it turned down, it wasn’t nearly as intriguing, so she returned the volume to the previous level.

  “Mae.”

  It was her voice, she knew, but then somehow it sounded less like her and more like some older, wiser version of herself. Mae had the thought that if she had an older sister, an older sister who had seen more than she had, that sister’s voice would sound like this.

  “Mae,” the voice said again.

  The voice seemed to lift Mae off her seat and spin her around. Every time she heard it, her heart sped up.

  “Mae.”

  “Yes,” she said finally.

  But nothing happened. It was not programmed to answer questions. She hadn’t been told how to respond. She tried nodding. “Thank you, Mae,” her voice said, and the bell rang.

  “Would you be willing to pay 1,200 dollars for a weeklong trip down the Grand Canyon?” the first voice asked again.

  “Yes.”

  The bell rang.

  It was all easy enough to assimilate. The first day, she’d gotten through 652 of the survey questions, and congratulatory messages came from Pete Ramirez, Dan and Jared. Feeling strong and wanting to impress them even more, she answered 820 the next day, and 991 the day after that. It was not difficult, and the validation felt good. Pete told her how much the clients were appreciating her input, her candor and her insights. Her aptitude for the program was making it easier to expand it to others in her pod, and by the end of the second week, a dozen others in the room were answering survey questions, too. It took a day or so to get used to, seeing so many people nodding so frequently—and with varying styles, some with sudden birdlike jerks, others more fluidly—but soon it was as normal as the rest of their routines, involving typing and sitting and seeing their work appear on an array of screens. At certain moments, there was the happy visual of a herd of heads nodding in what appeared to be unison, as if there were some common music playing in all of their minds.

  The extra layer of the CircleSurveys helped distract Mae from thinking about Kalden, who had yet to contact her, and who had not once answered his phone. She’d stopped calling after two days, and had chosen not to mention him at all to Annie or anyone else. Her thoughts about him followed a similar path as they had after their first encounter, at the circus. First, she found his unavailability intriguing, even novel. But after three days, it seemed willful and adolescent. By the fourth day, she was tired of the game. Anyone who disappeared like that was not a serious person. He wasn’t serious about her or how she felt. He had seemed supremely sensitive each time they’d met, but then, when apart, his absence, because it was total—and because total non-communication in a place like the Circle was so difficult, it felt like violence. Even though Kalden was the only man for whom she’d ever had real lust, she was finished. She would rather have someone lesser if that person were available, familiar, locatable.

  In the meantime, Mae was improving her CircleSurvey performance. Because their peers’ survey numbers were made available, competition was healthy and kept them all on their toes. Mae’s average was 1,345 questions each day, second-highest only to a newbie named Sebastian, who sat in the corner and never left his desk for lunch. Given she was still getting the newbies’ question-overrun on her fourth screen, Mae felt fine about being second in this one category. Especially given her PartiRank had been in the 1,900s all month, and Sebastian had yet to crack 4,000.

  She was trying to push into the 1,800s one Tuesday afternoon, commenting on hundreds of InnerCircle photos and posts, when she saw a figure in the distance, resting against the doorjamb at the far end of the room. It was a man, and he was wearing the same striped shirt Kalden was wearing when she’d last seen him. His arms were crossed, his head tilted, as if he was seeing something he couldn’t quite understand or believe. Mae was sure it was Kalden, and forgot to breathe. Before she could conceive of a less eager reaction, she waved, and he waved back, raising his hand just above his waist.

  “Mae,” the voice said through her headset.

  And at that moment, the figure in the doorway spun away and was gone.

  “Mae,” the voice said again.

  She took off the headphones and jogged to the door where she’d seen him, but he was gone. She instinctively went to the bathroom where she’d first met him, but he wasn’t there, either.

  When she got back to her desk, there was someone in her chair. It was Francis.

  “I’m still sorry,” he said.

  She looked at him. His heavy eyebrows, his boat-keel nose, his tentative smile. Mae sighed and took him in. That smile, she realized, was the smile of someone who was never sure he’d gotten the joke. Still, Mae had, in recent days, thought of Francis, the profound contrast he offered to Kalden. Kalden was a ghost, wanting Mae to chase him, and Francis was so available, so utterly without mystery. In a weak moment or two, Mae had wondered what she might do the next time she saw him. Would she succumb to Francis’s ready presence, to the simple fact that he wanted to be near her? The question had been in her head for days, but only now did she know the answer. No. He still disgusted her. His meekness. His neediness. His pleading voice. His thievery.

  “Have you deleted the video?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “You know I can’t.” Then he smiled, swiveling in her chair. He thought they were being friendly. “You had an InnerCircle survey question and I answered it. I assume you approve of the Circle sending aid to Yemen?”

  She pictured, briefly, burying her fist in his face.

  “Please leave,” she said.

  “Mae. No one’s watched the video. It’s just a part of the archive. It’s one of ten thousand clips that go up every day here at the Circle alone. One of a billion worldwide, every day.”

&n
bsp; “Well, I don’t want it to be one of the billion.”

  “Mae, you know technically neither one of us owns that video anymore. I couldn’t delete it if I tried. It’s like news. You don’t own the news, even if it happens to you. You don’t own history. It’s part of the collective record now.”

  Mae’s head was about to explode. “I have to work,” she said, managing not to slap him. “Can you leave?”

  Now he seemed, for the first time, to grasp that she really loathed him and did not want him near. His face twisted into something like a pout. He looked at his shoes. “You know they approved ChildTrack in Vegas?”

  And she felt for him, even if briefly. Francis was a desperate man who’d never had a childhood, had no doubt tried all his life to please those around him, the succession of foster parents who had no intention of keeping him.

  “That’s great, Francis,” she said.

  The beginnings of a smile lifted his face. Hoping it might pacify him and allow her to get back to work, she went further. “You’re saving a lot of lives.”

  Now he beamed. “You know, in six months it could be all over. It could be everywhere. Full saturation. Every child trackable, every child safe forever. Stenton told me this himself. Did you know he visited my lab? He’s taken a personal interest. And apparently they might change the name to TruYouth. Get it? TruYou, TruYouth?”

  “That’s so good, Francis,” Mae said, her body overtaken by a surge of feeling for him, some mix of empathy and pity and even admiration. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  Developments like Francis’s were happening with incredible frequency in those weeks. There was talk of the Circle, and Stenton in particular, taking over the running of San Vincenzo. It made sense, given most of the city’s services were funded by, and had been improved by, the company. There was a rumor that Project 9 engineers had figured out a way to replace the random jumble of our nighttime dreaming with organized thinking and real-life problem solving. Another Circle team was close to figuring out how to disassemble tornadoes as soon as they formed. And then there was everyone’s favorite project, in the works for months now: the counting of the sands in the Sahara. Did the world need this? The utility of the project was not immediately clear, but the Wise Men had a sense of humor about it. Stenton, who had initiated the endeavor, called it a lark, something they were doing, first of all, to see if it could be done—though there seemed to be no doubt, given the easy algorithms involved—and only secondarily for any scientific benefit. Mae understood it as most Circlers did: as a show of strength, and as a demonstration that with the will and ingenuity and economic wherewithal of the Circle, no earthly question would remain unanswered. And so, throughout the fall, with a bit of theatricality—they dragged out the process longer than necessary, for it only took them three weeks to count—they finally revealed the number of grains of sand in the Sahara, a number that was comically large and did not, immediately, mean much to anyone, beyond the acknowledgement that the Circle did what they said they would do. They got things done, and with spectacular speed and efficiency.

  The main development, and one that Bailey himself zinged about every few hours, was the rapid proliferation of other elected leaders, in the U.S. and globally, who had chosen to go clear. It was, to most minds, an inexorable progression. When Santos had first announced her new clarity, there was media coverage, but not the kind of explosion anyone at the Circle had hoped for. But then, as people logged on and began watching, and began realizing that she was deadly serious—that she was allowing viewers to see and hear precisely what went into her day, unfiltered and uncensored—the viewership grew exponentially. Santos posted her schedule each day, and by the second week, when she was meeting with a group of lobbyists wanting to drill in the Alaskan tundra, there were millions watching her. She was candid with these lobbyists, avoiding anything like preaching or pandering. She was so frank, asking the questions she would have asked behind closed doors, that it made for riveting, even inspiring viewing.

  By the third week, twenty-one other elected leaders in the U.S. had asked the Circle for their help in going clear. There was a mayor in Sarasota. A senator from Hawaii, and, not surprisingly, both senators from California. The entire city council of San Jose. The city manager of Independence, Kansas. And each time one of them made the commitment, the Wise Men zinged about it, and there was a hastily arranged press conference, showing the actual moment when their days went transparent. By the end of the first month, there were thousands of requests from all over the world. Stenton and Bailey were astounded, were flattered, were overwhelmed, they said, but were caught flat-footed. The Circle couldn’t meet all the demand. But they endeavored to do so.

  Production on the cameras, which were as yet unavailable to consumers, went into overdrive. The manufacturing plant, in China’s Guangdong province, added shifts and began construction on a second factory to quadruple their capacity. Every time a camera was installed and a new leader had gone transparent, there was another announcement from Stenton, another celebration, and the viewership grew. By the end of the fifth week, there were 16,188 elected officials, from Lincoln to Lahore, who had gone completely clear, and the waiting list was growing.

  The pressure on those who hadn’t gone transparent went from polite to oppressive. The question, from pundits and constituents, was obvious and loud: If you aren’t transparent, what are you hiding? Though some citizens and commentators objected on grounds of privacy, asserting that government, at virtually every level, had always needed to do some things in private for the sake of security and efficiency, the momentum crushed all such arguments and the progression continued. If you weren’t operating in the light of day, what were you doing in the shadows?

  And there was a wonderful thing that tended to happen, something that felt like poetic justice: every time someone started shouting about the supposed monopoly of the Circle, or the Circle’s unfair monetization of the personal data of its users, or some other paranoid and demonstrably false claim, soon enough it was revealed that that person was a criminal or deviant of the highest order. One was connected to a terror network in Iran. One was a buyer of child porn. Every time, it seemed, they would end up on the news, footage of investigators leaving their homes with computers, on which any number of unspeakable searches had been executed and where reams of illegal and inappropriate materials were stored. And it made sense. Who but a fringe character would try to impede the unimpeachable improvement of the world?

  Within weeks, the non-transparent officeholders were treated like pariahs. The clear ones wouldn’t meet with them if they wouldn’t go on camera, and thus these leaders were left out. Their constituents wondered what they were hiding, and their electoral doom was all but assured. In any coming election cycle, few would dare to run without declaring their transparency—and, it was assumed, this would immediately and permanently improve the quality of candidates. There would never again be a politician without immediate and thorough accountability, because their words and actions would be known and recorded and beyond debate. There would be no more back rooms, no more murky deal-making. There would be only clarity, only light.

  It was inevitable that transparency would come to the Circle, too. As clarity among elected officials proliferated, there were rumblings inside and outside the Circle: What about the Circle itself? Yes, Bailey said, in public and to the Circlers, we should also be clear. We should also be open. And so started the Circle’s own transparency plan, which began with the installation of a thousand SeeChange cameras on campus. They were placed in common rooms, cafeterias and outdoor spaces first. Then, as the Wise Men assessed any problems they might pose for the protection of intellectual property, they were placed in hallways, work areas, even laboratories. The saturation was not complete—there were still hundreds of more sensitive spaces without access, and the cameras were prohibited from bathrooms and other private rooms, but otherwise the campus, to the eyes of a billion-odd Circle users, was suddenly clear and open,
and the Circle devotees, who already felt loyal to the company and enthralled by its mystique, now felt closer, felt part of an open and welcoming world.

  There were eight SeeChange cameras in Mae’s pod, and within hours of them going live, she and everyone else in the room were provided another screen, on which they could see a grid of their own and lock into any view on campus. They could see if their favorite table at the Glass Eatery was available. They could see if the health club was jammed. They could see if the kickball game was a serious one or for duffers only. And Mae was surprised by how interesting Circle campus life was to outsiders. Within hours she was hearing from friends from high school and college, who had located her, who now could watch her work. Her middle-school gym teacher, who had once thought Mae insufficiently serious about the President’s Physical Fitness Test, now seemed impressed. Good to see you working so hard, Mae! A guy she dated briefly in college wrote: Don’t you ever leave that desk?

  She began to think a bit harder about the clothes she wore to work. She thought more about where she scratched, when she blew her nose or how. But it was a good kind of thinking, a good kind of calibration. And knowing she was being watched, that the Circle was, overnight, the most-watched workplace in the world, reminded her, more profoundly than ever, just how radically her life had changed in only a few months. She had been, twelve weeks ago, working at the public utility in her hometown, a town no one had heard of. Now she was communicating with clients all over the planet, commanding six screens, training a new group of newbies, and altogether feeling more needed, more valued, and more intellectually stimulated than she ever thought possible.

  And, with the tools the Circle made available, Mae felt able to influence global events, to save lives even, halfway across the world. That very morning, a message from a college friend, Tania Schwartz, came through, pleading for help with an initiative her brother was spearheading. There was a paramilitary group in Guatemala, some resurrection of the terrorizing forces of the eighties, and they had been attacking villages and taking women captive. One woman, Ana María Herrera, had escaped and told of ritual rapes, of teenage girls being made concubines, and the murders of those who would not cooperate. Mae’s friend Tania, never an activist in school, said she had been compelled to action by these atrocities, and she was asking everyone she knew to join in an initiative called We Hear You Ana María. Let’s make sure she knows she has friends all over the world who will not accept this, Tania’s message said.