The Circle

by Dave Eggers

  I’m watching you! the client, a media buyer for a sporting-goods importer in New Jersey, wrote. Her name was Janice, and she couldn’t get over the fact she could watch Mae typing the answer to her query in real-time, on her screen, right next to where she was receiving Mae’s typed answer. Hall of mirrors!! she wrote.

  After Janice, Mae had a series of clients who did not know it was her answering their queries, and Mae found that this bothered her. One of them, a T-shirt distributor from Orlando named Nanci, asked her to join her professional network, and Mae readily agreed. Jared had told her about a new level of reciprocation encouraged among the CE staff. If you send a survey, be prepared to answer one yourself. And so after she joined the Orlando T-shirt distributor’s professional network, she got another message from Nanci. She asked Mae to respond to a short questionnaire about her preferences in casual apparel, and Mae agreed. She linked to the questionnaire, which she realized was not short; it encompassed fully 120 questions. But Mae was happy to answer them, feeling her opinion mattered and was being heard, and this kind of reciprocation would engender loyalty from Nanci and all who Nanci came into contact with. After she answered the survey questions, Nanci sent her a profuse thank-you, and told her she could choose the T-shirt of her choice, and directed Mae to her consumer site. Mae said she would choose at a later time, but Nanci wrote back, telling Mae that she could not wait to see which shirt Mae would choose. Mae checked her clock; she’d been on the Orlando query for eight minutes, far surpassing the new guideline per query, which was 2.5.

  Mae knew she would have to power through the next ten or so queries to get back to an acceptable average. She went to Nanci’s site, chose a shirt that featured a cartoon dog in a superhero costume, and Nanci told her that it was a great choice. Mae then took the next query, and was in the process of an easy boilerplate conversion, when another message came from Nanci. Sorry to be Ms. Sensitive, but after I invited you to choose my professional network, you didn’t ask me to join your professional network, and though I know I’m just a nobody in Orlando, I felt like I had to tell you that it made me feel devalued. Mae told Nanci she had no intentions of making her feel devalued, that things were just busy at the Circle, and that she had spaced on this essential reciprocation, which she quickly remedied. Mae finished her next query, got a 98, and was following up on that one, when she got another message from Nanci. Did you see my message on the professional network? Mae looked at all her feeds and saw no message from Nanci. I posted it on the message board of your professional network! she said. And so Mae went to that page, which she didn’t visit often, and saw that Nanci had written, Hello stranger! Mae typed Hello yourself! But you’re no stranger!! and thought for a moment that that would mean the end of their exchange, but she paused on the page, briefly, with a sense that Nanci was not quite finished. And she wasn’t. So glad you wrote back! Thought you might be offended that I called you ‘Stranger.’ Promise you weren’t peeved? Mae promised Nanci that she was not peeved, answered with an XO, sent her ten subsequent smiles, and went back to her queries, hoping that Nanci was satisfied and happy and that they were cool. She took three more queries, she followed up with surveys, and saw that her average was at 99. This provoked a flurry of congratulatory zings, watchers happy to see Mae’s commitment, still, to the day-to-day tasks at the Circle and essential to the operation of the world. So many of her watchers, they reminded her, were working at desk jobs, too, and because she continued to do this work, voluntarily and with evident joy, they saw her as a role model and inspiration. And this felt good. This felt truly valuable to Mae. The customers made her better. And serving them while transparent made her far better. She expected this. She was apprised by Stewart that when thousands, or even millions, are watching, you perform your best self. You are cheerier, more positive, more polite, more generous, more inquisitive. But he had not told her of the smaller, improving alterations to her behavior.

  The first time the camera redirected her actions was when she went to the kitchen for something to eat. The image on her wrist showed the interior of the refrigerator as she scanned for a snack. Normally, she would have grabbed a chilled brownie, but seeing the image of her hand reaching for it, and seeing what everyone else would be seeing, she pulled back. She closed the fridge, and from the bowl on the counter, she selected a packet of almonds, and left the kitchen. Later that day, a headache appeared—caused, she thought, by eating less chocolate than usual. She reached into her bag, where she kept a few single-serving aspirin packets, but again, on her screen, she saw what everyone was seeing. She saw a hand searching her bag, clawing, and instantly she felt desperate and wretched, like some kind of pill-popping addict.

  She did without. Every day she’d done without things she didn’t want to want. Things she didn’t need. She’d given up soda, energy drinks, processed foods. At Circle social events, she nursed one drink only, and tried each time to leave it unfinished. Anything immoderate would provoke a flurry of zings of concern, so she stayed within the bounds of moderation. And she found it freeing. She was liberated from bad behavior. She was liberated from doing things she didn’t want to be doing, eating and drinking things that did her no good. Since she’d gone transparent, she’d become more noble. People called her a role model. Mothers said their daughters looked up to her, and this gave her more a feeling of responsibility, and that feeling of responsibility—to the Circlers, to their clients and partners, to the youth who saw inspiration in her—kept her grounded and fueled her days.

  She was reminded of the Circle’s own survey questions, and she put on her survey headset and got started. To her watchers she was expressing her opinions constantly, yes, and felt far more influential than before, but something about the tidy rhythm and call-and-response nature of the surveys felt missing. She took another customer query, and then nodded. The distant bell rang. She nodded.

  “Thank you. Are you happy with the state of airport security?”

  “Smile,” Mae said.

  “Thank you. Would you welcome change in airport security procedures?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Does the state of airport security dissuade you from flying more often?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you.”

  The questions continued, and she was able to get through ninety-four of them before she allowed herself to lapse. Soon the voice arrived, unchanged.

  “Mae.”

  She ignored it on purpose.

  “Mae.”

  Her name, spoken by her voice, continued to hold its power over her. And she hadn’t discovered why.

  “Mae.”

  It sounded, this time, like some purer version of herself.

  “Mae.”

  She looked down to her bracelet, seeing a number of zings asking if she was okay. She knew she had to respond, lest her watchers think she’d lost her mind. This was one of the many small adjustments she had to get used to—now there were thousands out there seeing what she saw, having access to her health data, hearing her voice, seeing her face—she was always visible through one or another of the campus SeeChange cameras, in addition to the one on her monitor—and so when anything deviated from her normal buoyancy, people noticed.

  “Mae.”

  She wanted to hear it again, so she said nothing.

  “Mae.”

  It was a young woman’s voice, a young woman’s voice that sounded bright and fierce and capable of anything.

  “Mae.”

  It was a better, more indomitable version of herself.

  “Mae.”

  She felt stronger every time she heard it.

  She stayed at CE until five, when she showed her watchers the newest Clarification, the governor of Arizona, and enjoyed the surprise transparency of the governor’s entire staff—something that many officials were doing, to ensure to their constituents that deals were not being done, in darkness, outside the light of the clear leader. At the Clarifying event,
Mae met up with Renata and Denise and Josiah—these Circlers who had once wielded some power over her and now were her acolytes—and afterward, they all had dinner in the Glass Eatery. There was little reason to leave campus for meals given that Bailey, hoping to engender more discussions and brain-sharing and socialization among Circlers, had instituted a new policy, whereby all food would be not only free, as it always had been, but prepared daily by a different notable chef. The chefs were happy for the exposure—thousands of Circlers smiling, zinging, posting photos—and the program was instantly and wildly popular and the cafeterias were overflowing with people and, presumably, ideas.

  Among the bustle that night, Mae ate, feeling unsteady, Kalden’s words and cryptic messages still rattling in her head. She was glad, then, for the distractions of the night. The improv comedy battle was appropriately terrible and funny despite its wall-to-wall incompetence, the Pakistan fundraiser was thoroughly inspiring—the event was able to amass 2.3 million smiles for the school—and finally there was the barbecue, where Mae allowed herself a second glass of wine before settling into her dorm.

  The room had been hers for six weeks now. It no longer made sense to drive back to her apartment, which was expensive and, last time she’d been there, after being gone for eight days, had mice. So she gave it up, and became one of the hundred Settlers, Circlers who had moved onto campus permanently. The advantages were obvious and the waiting list was now 1,209 names long. There was room on campus now for 288 Circlers, and the company had just bought a nearby building, a former factory, planning to convert it into 500 more rooms. Mae’s had been upgraded and now had fully smart appliances, wallscreens and shades, everything centrally monitored. The room was cleaned daily and the refrigerator stocked with both her standard items—tracked via Homie—and products in beta. She could have anything she wanted so long as she provided feedback to the manufacturers.

  She washed her face and brushed her teeth and settled into the cloud-white bed. Transparency was optional after ten p.m., and she usually went dark after her teeth-brushing, which she found people interested in generally, and, she believed, might promote good dental health among her younger watchers. At 10:11 p.m., she said good-night to her watchers—there were only 98,027 at that point, a few thousand of whom reciprocated her good-night wishes—lifted the lens over her head and placed it in its case. She was allowed to turn off the SeeChange cameras in the room, but she found she rarely did. She knew that the footage she might gather, herself, for instance about movements during sleep, could be valuable someday, so she left the cameras on. It had taken a few weeks to get used to sleeping with her wrist monitors—she’d scratched her face one night, and cracked her right screen another—but Circle engineers had improved the design, replacing the rigid screens with more flexible, unbreakable ones, and now she felt incomplete without them.

  She sat up in bed, knowing that it usually took her an hour or so to make her way to sleep. She turned on the wallscreen, planning to check on her parents. But their SeeChange cameras were all dark. She sent them a zing, expecting no answer and getting none. She sent a message to Annie but got no response. She paged through her Zing feed, reading a few funny ones, and, because she’d lost six pounds since going transparent, she spent twenty minutes looking for a new skirt and T-shirt, and somewhere in the eighth site she visited, she felt the tear opening up in her again. For no good reason, she checked to see if Mercer’s site was still down, and found it was. She looked for any recent mention of him online or news of his whereabouts, and found none. The tear was growing within her, opening quickly, a fathomless blackness spreading under her. In her fridge she had some of the sake Francis had introduced her to, so she got up, poured herself far too much, and drank it down. She went to the SeeChange portal and watched feeds from beaches in Sri Lanka and Brazil, feeling calmer, feeling warmer, and then remembered that a few thousand college kids, calling themselves ChangeSeers, had spread themselves all over the planet, installing cameras in the most remote regions. So for a time she watched the view from a camera in a Namibian desert village, a pair of women preparing a meal, their children playing in the background, but after a few minutes watching, she found the tear opening wider, the underwater screams getting louder, an unbearable hiss. She looked again for Kalden, spelling his name in new and irrational ways, scanning, for forty-five minutes, the company directory by face, finding no one like him at all. She turned off the SeeChange cameras, poured more sake, drank it down and got into bed, and, thinking of Kalden and his hands, his thin legs, his long fingers, she circled her nipples with her left hand while, with her right, she moved her underwear to the side and simulated the movements of a tongue, of his tongue. It had no effect. But the sake was draining her mind of worry, and finally, at just before twelve, she found something like sleep.

  “Okay, everyone,” Mae said. The morning was bright and she was feeling chipper enough to try out a phrase she hoped might catch on Circle-wide or beyond. “This is a day like every other day, in that it is unlike any other day!” After she said it, Mae checked her wrist, but saw little sign it had struck a nerve. She was momentarily deflated, but the day itself, the unlimited promise it offered, buoyed her. It was 9:34 a.m., the sun was again bright and warm, and the campus was busy and abuzz. If the Circlers needed any confirmation that they were in the middle of everything that mattered, the day had already brought it. Starting at 8:31, a series of helicopters had shaken the campus, bringing leaders from all the major health insurance companies, world health agencies, the Centers for Disease Control, and every significant pharmaceutical company. Finally, it was rumored, there would be complete information-sharing among all of these previously disconnected and even adversarial entities, and when they were coordinated, and once all the health data they’d collected was shared, most of this made possible through the Circle and more importantly, TruYou, viruses could be stopped at their sources, diseases would be tracked to their roots. All morning Mae had watched these executives and doctors and officials stride happily through the grounds, heading for the just-built Hippocampus. There, they’d have a day of meetings—private this time, with public forums promised in the future—and, later, there would be a concert from some aging singer-songwriter only Bailey cared for, who had come in the night before, for dinner with the Wise Men.

  Most important for Mae, though, was that one of the many morning helicopters contained Annie, who was finally coming home. She’d been gone for almost a month in Europe and China and Japan, ironing out some regulatory wrinkles, meeting with some of the transparent leaders there, the results of which seemed good, judging from the number of smiles Annie had posted on her Zing feed at the trip’s conclusion. But more meaningful conversation between Mae and Annie had been difficult. Annie had congratulated her on her transparency, on her ascension, as Annie put it, but then had become very busy. Too busy to write notes of consequence, too busy to have phone calls she could be proud of, she’d said. They’d exchanged brief messages every day, but Annie’s schedule had been, in her words, madcap, and the time difference meant they were rarely in sync and able to exchange anything profound.

  Annie had promised to arrive in the morning, direct from Beijing, and Mae was having trouble concentrating while waiting. She’d been watching the helicopters land, squinting high on the rooftops, looking for Annie’s yellow head, to no avail. And now she had to spend an hour at the Protagorean Pavilion, a task she knew was important and normally would find fascinating but today felt like an unbreachable wall between herself and her closest friend.

  On a granite panel outside the Protagorean Pavilion the building’s namesake was quoted loosely: Humans are the measure of all things. “More important for our purposes,” Mae said, opening the door, “is that now, with the tools available, humans can measure all things. Isn’t that right Terry?”

  In front of her stood a tall Korean-American man, Terry Min. “Hello Mae, hello Mae’s watchers and followers.”

  “You cut your hair so
me new way,” Mae said.

  With Annie coming back, Mae was feeling loopy, goofy, and Terry was temporarily derailed. He hadn’t counted on ad-libs. “Uh, yeah,” he said, running his fingers through it.

  “It’s angular,” Mae said.

  “Right. It is more angular. Should we go inside?”

  “We should.”

  The designers of the building had taken pains to use organic shapes, to soften the rigid math of the engineers’ daily work. The atrium was encased in silver and seemed to undulate, as if they stood at the bottom of an enormous corrugated tube.

  “What will we be seeing today, Terry?”

  “I thought we’d start with a tour, and then go a bit deeper with some stuff we’re doing for the educational sector.”

  Mae followed Terry through the building, which was more of an engineer’s lair than the parts of campus she’d become accustomed to visiting. The trick with her audience was to balance the mundane with the more glamorous parts of the Circle; both were necessary to reveal, and certainly thousands of viewers were more interested in the boiler-rooms than the penthouses, but the calibration had to be precise.

  They passed Josef and his teeth, and then said hello to various developers and engineers, each of whom turned to explain their work as best as they could. Mae checked the time and saw there was a new notice from Dr. Villalobos. She asked Mae to come visit as soon as she could. Nothing urgent, she said. But it should be today. As they made their way through the building, Mae typed back to the doctor, saying she’d see her in thirty minutes. “Should we see the education project now?”

  “I think that’s a great idea,” Terry said.