The Circle

by Dave Eggers

  Mae went inside.

  When she was finished, she opened the door to find the man in the same place, now looking out the window.

  “You look lost,” Mae said.

  “Nah. Just figuring out something before, you know, heading upstairs. You work over here?”

  “I do. I’m new. In CE.”

  “CE?”

  “Customer Experience.”

  “Oh right. We used to just call it Customer Service.”

  “So I take it you’re not new?”

  “Me? No, no. I’ve been here a little while. Not so much in this building.” He smiled and looked out the window, and with his face turned away, Mae took him in. His eyes were dark, his face oval, and his hair was grey, almost white, but he couldn’t have been older than thirty. He was thin, sinewy, and his skinny jeans and tight long-sleeve jersey gave his silhouette the quick thick-thin brushstrokes of calligraphy.

  He turned back to her, blinking, scoffing at himself and his poor manners. “Sorry. I’m Kalden.”

  “Kalden?”

  “It’s Tibetan,” he said. “It means golden something. My parents always wanted to go to Tibet but never got closer than Hong Kong. And your name?”

  “Mae,” she said, and they shook hands. His handshake was sturdy but perfunctory. He’d been taught how to shake hands, Mae guessed, but had never seen the point.

  “So you’re not lost,” Mae said, realizing she was expected back at her desk; she’d already been late once today.

  Kalden sensed it. “Oh. You have to go. Can I walk you there? Just to see where you work?”

  “Um,” Mae said, now feeling very unsettled. “Sure.” If she hadn’t known better, and couldn’t see the ID cord around his neck, she would have assumed Kalden, with his pointed but unfocused curiosity, was either someone who’d wandered off the street, or some kind of corporate spy. But she didn’t know anything. She’d been at the Circle a week. This could be some sort of test. Or just an eccentric fellow Circler.

  Mae led him back to her desk.

  “It’s very clean,” he said.

  “I know. I just started, remember.”

  “And I know some of the Wise Men like the Circle desks very tidy. You ever see those guys around here?”

  “Who? The Wise Men?” Mae scoffed. “Not here. Not yet at least.”

  “Yeah, I guess not,” Kalden said and crouched, his head at the level of Mae’s shoulder. “Can I see what you do?”

  “For my work?”

  “Yeah. Can I watch? I mean, not if it makes you uncomfortable.”

  Mae paused. Everything and everyone else she’d experienced at the Circle hewed to a logical model, a rhythm, but Kalden was the anomaly. His rhythm was different, atonal and strange, but not unpleasant. His face was so open, his eyes liquid, gentle, unassuming, and he spoke so softly that any possibility of threat seemed remote.

  “Sure. I guess,” she said. “It’s not so exciting, though.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  And so he watched Mae answer requests. When she turned to him after every seemingly mundane part of her job, the screen danced brightly in his eyes, his face rapt—like he’d never seen anything more interesting in his life. At other moments, though, he seemed removed, seeing something she couldn’t. He’d look at the screen but his eyes were seeing something deep within.

  She continued, and he continued to ask occasional questions. “Now who was that?” “How often does that happen?” “Why did you respond in that way?”

  He was close to her, far too close if he was a normal person with everyday ideas of personal space, but it was abundantly clear he was not this kind of person, a normal kind of person. As he watched the screen, and sometimes Mae’s fingers on the keyboard, his chin got ever-closer to her shoulder, his breath light but audible, his smell, a simple one of soap and banana shampoo, coming to her on the winds of his tiny exhalations. The whole experience was so odd that Mae laughed nervously every few seconds, not knowing what else to do. And then it was done. He cleared his throat and stood up.

  “Well, I better head out,” he said. “I’ll just slip away. Don’t want to interrupt your pace here. I’ll see you around campus I’m sure.”

  And he was gone.

  Before Mae could unpack any of what just happened, a new face was beside her.

  “Hi. I’m Gina. Dan said I’d be here?”

  Mae nodded, though she didn’t remember anything about this. She looked at Gina, a woman a few years older than herself, hoping to remember something about her or this meeting. Gina’s eyes, black and heavy with eyeliner and moon-blue mascara, smiled at her, though Mae felt no warmth emanating from these eyes, or from Gina at all.

  “Dan said this would be a good moment to set up all your socials. You got time?”

  “Sure,” Mae said, though she had no time at all.

  “I take it last week was too busy for you to set up your company social account? And I don’t think you’ve imported your old profile?”

  Mae cursed herself. “I’m sorry. I’ve been pretty overwhelmed so far.”

  Gina frowned.

  Mae backtracked, masking her miscalculation with a laugh. “No, in a good way! But I haven’t had time yet to do extracurricular stuff.”

  Gina tilted her head and cleared her throat theatrically. “That’s so interesting you put it that way,” she said, smiling, though she didn’t seem happy. “We actually see your profile, and the activity on it, as integral to your participation here. This is how your coworkers, even those on the other side of campus, know who you are. Communication is certainly not extracurricular, right?”

  Now Mae was embarrassed. “Right,” she said. “Of course.”

  “If you visit a coworker’s page and write something on the wall, that’s a positive thing. That’s an act of community. An act of reaching out. And of course I don’t have to tell you that this company exists because of the social media you consider ‘extracurricular.’ My understanding was that you used our social media tools before coming here?”

  Mae was unsure what she could say to appease Gina. She’d been so busy at work, and didn’t want to seem distracted, so she’d delayed re-activating her social profile.

  “I’m sorry,” Mae managed. “I didn’t mean to imply that it was extracurricular. I actually think it’s central. I was just getting acclimated here at work and wanted to focus on learning my new responsibilities.”

  But Gina had hit a groove and would not be stopped until she’d finished her thought. “You realize that community and communication come from the same root word, communis, Latin for common, public, shared by all or many?”

  Mae’s heart was hammering. “I’m very sorry, Gina. I fought to get a job here. I do know all this. I’m here because I believe in everything you said. I was just a bit crazed last week and didn’t get a chance to set it up.”

  “Okay. But just know, from now on, that being social, and being a presence on your profile and all related accounts—this is part of why you’re here. We consider your online presence to be integral to your work here. It’s all connected.”

  “I know. Again, I’m sorry to have misstated my feelings.”

  “Good. Okay, let’s start by setting this up.” Gina reached over Mae’s divider and retrieved another screen, bigger than her second screen, which she quickly arranged and connected to Mae’s computer.

  “Okay. So your second screen will continue to be the way you’ll stay in touch with your team. That will be exclusively for CE business. Your third screen is for your social participation, in the company Circle and your wider Circle. Does that make sense?”

  “It does.”

  Mae watched Gina activate the screen, and felt a thrill. She’d never had such an elaborate arrangement before. Three screens for someone so low on the ladder! Only at the Circle.

  “Okay, first I want to go back to your second screen,” Gina said. “I don’t think you’ve activated CircleSearch. Let’s do that.” An elaborat
e, three-dimensional map of the campus appeared. “This is pretty simple, and just allows you to find anyone on campus in case you need a face-to-face.”

  Gina pointed to a pulsing red dot.

  “Here’s you. You’re red hot! I’m kidding.” As if recognizing that might have been considered inappropriate, Gina quickly moved on. “Didn’t you say you knew Annie? Let’s type in her name.” A blue dot appeared in the Old West. “She’s in her office, surprise surprise. Annie is a machine.”

  Mae smiled. “She is.”

  “I’m so jealous you know her so well,” Gina said, smiling but briefly and unconvincingly. “And over here you’ll see a cool new app, which sort of gives us a history of the building every day. You can see when each staffer checked in every day, when they left the building. This gives us a really nice sense of the life of the company. This part you don’t have to update yourself, of course. If you go to the pool, your ID automatically updates that on the feed. And outside of the movement, any additional commentary would be up to you, and of course would be encouraged.”

  “Commentary?” Mae asked.

  “You know, like what you thought of lunch, a new feature at the gym, anything. Just basic ratings and likes and comments. Nothing out of the ordinary, and of course all input helps us do a better job at serving the Circle community. Now that commentary is done right here,” she said, and revealed that every building and room could be clicked on, and within, she could add any comments about anything or anyone.

  “So that’s your second screen. It’s about your coworkers, your team, and it’s about finding people in the physical space. Now it’s on to the really fun stuff. Screen three. This is where your main social and Zing feeds appear. I heard you weren’t a Zing user?”

  Mae admitted she hadn’t been, but wanted to be.

  “Great,” Gina said. “So now you have a Zing account. I made up a name for you: MaeDay. Like the war holiday. Isn’t that cool?”

  Mae wasn’t so sure about the name, and couldn’t remember a holiday by that name.

  “And I connected your Zing account with the total Circle community, so you just got 10,041 new followers! Pretty cool. In terms of your own zinging, we’d expect about ten or so a day, but that’s sort of a minimum. I’m sure you’ll have more to say than that. Oh, and over here’s your playlist. If you listen to music while you work, the feed automatically sends that playlist out to everyone else, and it goes into the collective playlist, which ranks the most-played songs in any given day, week, month. It has the top one hundred songs campuswide, but you can also slice it a thousand ways—top-played hip-hop, indie, country, anything. You’ll get recommendations based on what you play, and what others with similar taste play—it’s all cross-pollinating while you’re working. Make sense?”

  Mae nodded.

  “Now, next to the Zing feed, you’ll see the window for your primary social feed. You’ll also see that we split it into two parts, the InnerCircle social feed, and your external social, that’s your OuterCircle. Isn’t that cute? You can merge them, but we find it helpful to see the two distinct feeds. But of course the OuterCircle is still in the Circle, right? Everything is. Make sense so far?”

  Mae said it did.

  “I can’t believe you’ve been here a week without being on the main social feed. You’re about to have your world rocked.” Gina tapped Mae’s screen and Mae’s InnerCircle stream became a torrent of messages pouring down the monitor.

  “See, you’re getting all last week’s stuff, too. That’s why there’s so many. Wow, you really missed a lot.”

  Mae followed the counter on the bottom of the screen, calculating all the messages sent to her from everyone else at the Circle. The counter paused at 1,200. Then 4,400. The numbers scrambled higher, stopping periodically but finally settling at 8,276.

  “That was last week’s messages? Eight thousand?”

  “You can catch up,” Gina said brightly. “Maybe even tonight. Now, let’s open up your regular social account. We call it OuterCircle, but it’s the same profile, same feed as you’ve had for years. Mind if I open it up?”

  Mae didn’t mind. She watched as her social profile, the one she’d first set up years ago, now appeared on her third screen, next to the InnerCircle feed. A cascade of messages and photos, a few hundred, filled the monitor.

  “Okay, looks like you have some catching up to do here, too,” Gina said. “A feast! Have fun.”

  “Thank you,” Mae said. She tried to sound as excited as she could. She needed Gina to like her.

  “Oh wait. One more thing. I should explain message hierarchy. Shit. I almost forgot message hierarchy. Dan would kill me. Okay, so you know that your first-screen CE responsibilities are paramount. We have to serve our customers with our full attention and our full hearts. So that’s understood.”

  “It is.”

  “On your second screen, you might get messages from Dan and Jared, or Annie, or anyone directly supervising your work. Those messages inform the minute-to-minute quality of your service. So that would be your second priority. Clear?”

  “Clear.”

  “The third screen is your social, Inner- and OuterCircle. But these messages aren’t, like, superfluous. They’re just as important as any other messages, but are prioritized third. And sometimes they’re urgent. Keep an eye on the InnerCircle feed in particular, because that’s where you’ll hear about staff meetings, mandatory gatherings, and any breaking news. If there’s a Circle notice that’s really pressing, that’ll be marked in orange. Something extremely urgent will prompt a message on your phone, too. You keep that in view?” Mae nodded at her phone, resting just below the screens on her desk. “Good,” Gina said. “So those are the priorities, with your fourth priority your own OuterCircle participation. Which is just as important as anything else, because we value your work-life balance, you know, the calibration between your online life here at the company and outside it. I hope that’s clear. Is it?”

  “It is.”

  “Good. So I think you’re all set. Any questions?”

  Mae said she was fine.

  Gina’s head tilted skeptically, indicating she knew that Mae actually had many questions still, but didn’t want to ask them for fear of looking uninformed. Gina stood up, smiled, took a step back, but then stopped. “Crap. Forgot one more thing.” She crouched next to Mae, typed for a few seconds, and a number appeared on the third screen, looking much like her aggregate CE score. It said: MAE HOLLAND: 10,328.

  “This is your Participation Rank, PartiRank for short. Some people here call it the Popularity Rank, but it’s not really that. It’s just an algorithm-generated number that takes into account all your activity in the InnerCircle. Does that make sense?”

  “I think so.”

  “It takes into account zings, exterior followers of your intra-company zings, comments on your zings, your comments on others’ zings, your comments on other Circlers’ profiles, your photos posted, attendance at Circle events, comments and photos posted about those events—basically it collects and celebrates all you do here. The most active Circlers are ranked highest of course. As you can see, your rank is low now, but that’s because you’re new and we just activated your social feed. But every time you post or comment or attend anything, that gets factored in, and you’ll see your rank change accordingly. That’s where the fun comes in. You post, you rise in the rankings. A bunch of people like your post, and you really shoot up. It moves all day. Cool?”

  “Very,” Mae said.

  “We started you with a little boost—otherwise you’d be 10,411. And again, it’s just for fun. You’re not judged by your rank or anything. Some Circlers take it very seriously, of course, and we love it when people want to participate, but the rank is really just a fun way to see how your participation manifests itself vis-à-vis the overall Circle community. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay then. You know how to get hold of me.”

  And with that, Gina t
urned and left.

  Mae opened the intra-company stream and began. She was determined to get through all the Inner and Outer feeds that night. There were company-wide notices about each day’s menus, each day’s weather, each day’s words of the wise—last week’s aphorisms were from MLK, Gandhi, Salk, Mother Teresa and Steve Jobs. There were notices about each day’s campus visits: a pet adoption agency, a state senator, a Congressman from Tennessee, the director of Médecins Sans Frontières. Mae found out, with a sting of remorse, that she’d missed, that very morning, a visit from Muhammad Yunus, winner of the Nobel Prize. She plowed through the messages, every one, looking for anything she would have reasonably been expected to answer personally. There were surveys, at least fifty of them, gauging the Circlers’ opinions on various company policies, on optimal dates for upcoming gatherings, interest groups, celebrations and holiday breaks. There were dozens of clubs soliciting members and notifying all of meetings: there were cat-owner groups—at least ten—a few rabbit groups, six reptile groups, four of them adamantly snake-exclusive. Most of all, there were groups for dog-owners. She counted twenty-two, but was sure that wasn’t all of them. One of the groups dedicated to the owners of very small dogs, Lucky Lapdogs, wanted to know how many people would join a weekend club for walks and hikes and support; Mae ignored this one. Then, realizing that ignoring it would only prompt a second, more urgent, message, she typed a message, explaining that she didn’t have a dog. She was asked to sign a petition for more vegan options at lunch; she did. There were nine messages from various work-groups within the company, asking her to join their subCircles for more specific updates and information sharing. For now she joined the ones dedicated to crochet, soccer, and Hitchcock.

  There seemed to be a hundred parents’ groups—first-time parents, divorced parents, parents of autistic children, parents of Guatemalan adoptees, Ethiopian adoptees, Russian adoptees. There were seven improv comedy groups, nine swim teams—there had been an inter-staff meet last Wednesday, hundreds of swimmers participating, and a hundred messages were about the contest, who won, some glitch with the results, and how a mediator would be on campus to settle any lingering questions or grievances. There were visits, ten a day at least, from companies presenting innovative new products to the Circle. New fuel-efficient cars. New fair-trade sneakers. New locally sourced tennis rackets. There were meetings of every conceivable department—R&D, search, social, outreach, professional networking, philanthropic, ad sales, and with a plummeting of her stomach, Mae saw that she’d missed a meeting, deemed “pretty much mandatory” for all newbies. That had been last Thursday. Why hadn’t anyone told her? Well, stupid, she answered herself. They did tell you. Right here.