The Circle

by Dave Eggers

  Mae’s throat was dry and she tried not to show her emotion. “It doesn’t. It feels very wrong.” Mae thought of Bailey’s son Gunner, and thought of her own father.

  “Do you think they have a right to see things like you saw?”

  “I do.”

  “In this short life,” Bailey said, “why shouldn’t everyone see whatever it is they want to see? Why shouldn’t everyone have equal access to the sights of the world? The knowledge of the world? All the experiences available in this world?”

  Mae’s voice was just above a whisper. “Everyone should.”

  “But this experience you had, you kept it to yourself. Which is curious, because you do share online. You work at the Circle. Your PartiRank is in the T2K. So why do you think this particular hobby of yours, these extraordinary explorations, why hide these from the world?”

  “I can’t quite figure out what I was thinking, to be honest,” Mae said.

  The crowd murmured. Bailey nodded.

  “Okay. We just talked about how we, as humans, hide what we’re ashamed of. We do something illegal, or unethical, and we hide it from the world because we know it’s wrong. But hiding something glorious, a wonderful trip on the water, the moonlight coming down, a shooting star …”

  “It was just selfish, Eamon. It was selfish and nothing more. The same way a child doesn’t want to share her favorite toy. I understand that secrecy is part of, well, an aberrant behavior system. It comes from a bad place, not a place of light and generosity. And when you deprive your friends, or someone like your son Gunner, of experiences like I had, you’re basically stealing from them. You’re depriving them of something they have a right to. Knowledge is a basic human right. Equal access to all possible human experiences is a basic human right.”

  Mae surprised herself with her eloquence, and the audience answered with thunderous applause. Bailey was looking at her like a proud father. When the applause subsided, Bailey spoke softly, as if reluctant to get in her way.

  “You had a way of putting it that I’d like you to repeat.”

  “Well, it’s embarrassing, but I said that sharing is caring.”

  The audience laughed. Bailey smiled warmly.

  “I don’t think it’s embarrassing. This expression has been around for a while, but it applies here, doesn’t it, Mae? Maybe uniquely apropos.”

  “I think it’s simple. If you care about your fellow human beings, you share what you know with them. You share what you see. You give them anything you can. If you care about their plight, their suffering, their curiosity, their right to learn and know anything the world contains, you share with them. You share what you have and what you see and what you know. To me, the logic there is undeniable.”

  The audience cheered, and while they did so, three new words, SHARING IS CARING, appeared on the screen, below the previous three. Bailey was shaking his head, amazed.

  “I love that. Mae, you have a way with words. And there’s one more statement you made that I think should cap off what I think everyone here would agree has been a wonderfully enlightening and inspiring talk.”

  The audience clapped warmly.

  “We were talking about what you saw as the impulse to keep things to yourself.”

  “Well, it’s not something I’m proud of, and I don’t think it rises above the level of simple selfishness. Now I really understand that. I understand that we’re obligated, as humans, to share what we see and know. And that all knowledge must be democratically accessible.”

  “It’s the natural state of information to be free.”

  “Right.”

  “We all have a right to know everything we can. We all collectively own the accumulated knowledge of the world.”

  “Right,” Mae said. “So what happens if I deprive anyone or everyone of something I know? Aren’t I stealing from my fellow humans?”

  “Indeed,” Bailey said, nodding earnestly. Mae looked to the audience, and saw the entire first row, the only faces visible, nodding, too.

  “And given your way with words, Mae, I wonder if you can tell us this third and last revelation you made. What did you say?”

  “Well, I said, privacy is theft.”

  Bailey turned to the audience. “Isn’t that an interesting way of putting it, guys? ‘Privacy is theft.’ ” The words now appeared on the screen behind him, in great white letters:

  PRIVACY IS THEFT

  Mae turned to look at the three lines together. She blinked back tears, seeing it all there. Had she really thought of all that herself?

  SECRETS ARE LIES

  SHARING IS CARING

  PRIVACY IS THEFT

  Mae’s throat was tight, dry. She knew she couldn’t speak, so she hoped Bailey wouldn’t ask her to. As if sensing how she felt, that she was overcome, he winked at her and turned to the audience.

  “Let’s thank Mae for her candor, her brilliance, and her consummate humanity, can we please?”

  The audience was on its feet. Mae’s face was on fire. She didn’t know if she should sit or stand. She stood briefly, then felt silly, so sat down again, and waved from her lap.

  Somewhere in the stampeding applause, Bailey managed to announce the capper to it all—that Mae, in the interest of sharing all she saw and could offer the world, would be going transparent immediately.

  BOOK II

  IT WAS A BIZARRE creature, ghostlike, vaguely menacing and never still, but no one who stood before it could look away. Mae was hypnotized by it, its slashing form, its fins like blades, its milky skin and wool-grey eyes. It was certainly a shark, it had its distinctive shape, its malevolent stare, but this was a new species, omnivorous and blind. Stenton had brought it back from his trip to the Marianas Trench, in the Circle submersible. The shark was not the only discovery—Stenton had retrieved heretofore unknown jellyfishes, seahorses, manta rays, all of them near-translucent, ethereal in their movements, all on display in a series of enormous aquariums he’d had constructed, nearly overnight, to house them.

  Mae’s tasks were to show her watchers the beasts, to explain when necessary, and to be, through the lens worn around her neck, a window into this new world, and the world, generally, of the Circle. Every morning Mae put on a necklace, much like Stewart’s, but lighter, smaller, and with the lens worn over her heart. There, it presented the steadiest view, and the widest. It saw everything that Mae saw, and often more. The quality of the raw video was such that viewers could zoom, pan, freeze and enhance. The audio was carefully engineered to focus on her immediate conversations, to record but make secondary any ambient sound or background voices. In essence, it meant that any room she was in was scannable by anyone watching; they could focus in on any corner, and, with some effort, isolate and listen to any other conversation.

  There was to be a feeding for all of Stenton’s discoveries any minute, but the animal she and her watchers were particularly interested in was the shark. She hadn’t yet seen it eat, but word was it was insatiable and very quick. Though blind, it found its meals immediately, no matter how big or small, alive or dead, and digested them with alarming speed. One minute a herring or squid would be dropped into the tank with it, and moments later the shark would deposit, on the aquarium floor, all that remained of that animal—a tiny grainy substance that looked like ash. This act was made more fascinating given the shark’s translucent skin, which allowed an unfettered view into its digestive process.

  She heard a droplet through her earpiece. “Feeding moved back to 1:02,” a voice said. It was now 12:51.

  Mae looked down the dark hallway, to the three other aquariums, each of them slightly smaller than the one before it. The hall was kept entirely unlit, to best highlight the electric-blue aquariums and the fog-white creatures within.

  “Let’s move over to the octopus for now,” the voice said.

  The main audio feed, from Additional Guidance to Mae, was provided via a tiny earpiece, and this allowed the AG team to give her occasional directions—to suggest
she drop by the Machine Age, for example, to show her watchers a new, solar-powered consumer drone that could travel unlimited distances, across continents and seas, provided adequate exposure to sun; she’d done that visit earlier this day. This was a good portion of her day, the touring of various departments, the introduction of new products, either Circle-made or Circle-endorsed. It ensured that every day was different, and had, in the six weeks she’d been transparent, exposed Mae to virtually every corner of the campus—from the Age of Sail to the Old Kingdom, where they were, on a lark more than anything, working on a project to attach a camera to every remaining polar bear.

  “Let’s see the octopus,” Mae said to her viewers.

  She moved over to a round glass structure sixteen feet high and twelve feet in diameter. Inside, a pale spineless being, the hue of a cloud but veined in blue and green, was feeling around, guessing and flailing, like a near-blind man fumbling for his glasses.

  “This is a relative of the telescope octopus,” Mae said, “but this one has never been captured alive before.”

  Its shape seemed to change continuously, balloon-like and bulbous one moment, as if inflating itself, confident and growing, then the next it would be shrinking, spinning, stretching and reaching, unsure of its true form.

  “As you can see, its true size is very hard to discern. One second it seems like you could hold it in your hand, and the next it encompasses most of the tank.”

  The creature’s tentacles seemed to want to know everything: the shape of the glass, the topography of the coral below, the feel of the water all around.

  “He’s almost endearing,” Mae said, watching the octopus reach from wall to wall, spreading itself like a net. Something about its curiosity gave it a sentient presence, full of doubt and wanting.

  “Stenton found this one first,” she said about the octopus, which was now rising from the floor, slowly, flamboyantly. “It came from behind his submersible and shot in front, as if it were asking him to follow. You can see how fast it might have moved.” The octopus was now careening around the aquarium, propelling itself in motions like the opening and closing of an umbrella.

  Mae checked the time. It was 12:54. She had a few minutes to kill. She kept her lens on the octopus.

  She was under no illusion that every minute of every day was equally scintillating to her watchers. In the weeks Mae had been transparent, there had been downtime, a good deal of it, but her task, primarily, was to provide an open window into life at the Circle, the sublime and the banal. “Here we are in the gym,” she might say, showing viewers the health club for the first time. “People are running and sweating and devising ways to check each other out without getting caught.” Then, an hour later, she might be eating lunch, casually and without commentary, across from other Circlers, all of them behaving, or attempting to, as if no one was watching at all. Most of her fellow Circlers were happy to be on-camera, and after a few days all Circlers knew that it was a part of their job at the Circle, and an elemental part of the Circle, period. If they were to be a company espousing transparency, and the global and unending advantages of open access, they needed to be living that ideal, always and everywhere, and especially on campus.

  Thankfully, there was enough to illuminate and celebrate within the Circle gates. The fall and winter had brought the inevitable, all of it, with blitzkrieg speed. All over campus there were signs that hinted at imminent Completion. The messages were cryptic, meant to pique curiosity and discussion. What would Completion mean? Staffers were asked to contemplate this, submit answers, and write on the idea boards. Everyone on Earth has a Circle account! one popular message said. The Circle solves world hunger, said another. The Circle helps me find my ancestors, said yet another. No data, human or numerical or emotional or historical, is ever lost again. That one had been written and signed by Bailey himself. The most popular was The Circle helps me find myself.

  So many of these developments had been long in the planning stages at the Circle, but the timing had never been quite so right, and the momentum was too strong to be resisted. Now, with 90 percent of Washington transparent, and the remaining 10 percent wilting under the suspicion of their colleagues and constituents, the question beat down on them like an angry sun: what are you hiding? The plan was that most Circlers would be transparent within the year, but for the time being, to work out the bugs and get everyone used to the idea, it was just Mae and Stewart, but his experiment had been largely eclipsed by Mae’s. Mae was young, and moved far quicker than Stewart, and had her voice—watchers loved it, comparing it to music, calling it like woodwind and a wonderful acoustic strum—and Mae was loving it, too, feeling daily the affection of millions flow through her.

  It took getting used to, though, starting with the basic working of the equipment. The camera was light, and after a few days, Mae could barely sense the weight of the lens, no heavier than a locket, over her breastbone. They’d tried various ways to keep it on her chest, including velcro attached to her clothing, but nothing was as effective, and simple, as simply hanging it around her neck. The second adjustment, one she found continually fascinating and occasionally jarring, was seeing—through a small frame on her right wrist—what the camera was seeing. She’d all but forgotten about her left-wrist health monitor, but the camera had made essential the use of this, a second, right-wrist bracelet. It was the same size and material as her left, but with a larger screen to accommodate video and a summation of all of her data on her usual screens. With a bracelet on each wrist, each snug and with a brushed-metal finish, she felt like Wonder Woman and knew something of her power—though the idea was too ridiculous to tell anyone about.

  On her left wrist, she saw her heartbeat; on her right, she could see what her watchers were seeing—a real-time view from her lens, which allowed her to make any necessary adjustments to the view. It also gave her current watcher numbers, her rankings and ratings, and highlighted the most recent and most popular comments from viewers. At that moment, standing before the octopus, Mae had 441,762 watchers, which was a little above her average, but still less than what she’d hoped for while revealing Stenton’s deep-sea discoveries. The other numbers displayed were unsurprising. She was averaging 845,029 unique visitors to her live footage in any given day, and had 2.1 million followers to her Zing feed. She no longer had to worry about staying in the T2K; her visibility, and the immense power of her audience, guaranteed stratospheric Conversion Rates and Retail Raws, and ensured she was always in the top ten.

  “Let’s see the seahorses,” Mae said, and moved to the next aquarium. There, amid a pastel bouquet of coral and flowing fronds of blue seaweed, she saw hundreds, maybe thousands, of tiny beings, no bigger than the fingers of a child, hiding in nooks, clinging to the foliage. “Not particularly friendly fish, these guys. Wait, are they even fish?” she asked, and looked to her wrist, where a watcher had already sent the answer. Absolutely a fish! Class Actinopterygii. Same as cod and tuna.

  “Thank you, Susanna Win from Greensboro!” Mae said, and rezinged the information to her followers. “Now let’s see if we can find the daddy of all these baby seahorses. As you might know, the male seahorse is the one that carries the offspring. The hundreds of babies you see were birthed just after the daddy arrived here. Now where is he?” Mae walked around the aquarium, and soon found him, about the size of her hand, resting at the bottom of the tank, leaning against the glass. “I think he’s hiding,” Mae said, “but he doesn’t seem to know we’re on the other side of the glass here, and can see everything.”

  She checked her wrist and adjusted the angle of her lens a bit, to get the best look at the fragile fish. He was curled with his back to her, looking exhausted and shy. She put her face, and lens, up to the glass, so close to him she could see the tiny clouds in his intelligent eyes, the unlikely freckles on his delicate snout. He was an improbable creature, a terrible swimmer, built like a Chinese lantern and utterly without defense. Her wrist highlighted a zing with exceptionally
high ratings. The croissant of the animal kingdom, it said, and Mae repeated it aloud. But despite his fragility, somehow he had already reproduced, had given life to a hundred more like himself, while the octopus and the shark had traced the contours of their tanks and eaten. Not that the seahorse seemed to care. He was apart from his progeny, as if having no clue where they came from, and no interest in what happened to them.

  Mae checked the time. 1:02. Additional Guidance spoke through her earpiece: “Shark feeding ready.”

  “Okay,” Mae said, glancing at her wrist. “I’m seeing a bunch of requests that we get back to the shark, and it’s after one, so I’m thinking we’ll do that.” She left the seahorse, who turned to her, briefly, as if not wanting to see her go.

  Mae made her way back to the first and largest aquarium, which held Stenton’s shark. Above the aquarium, she saw a young woman, with curly black hair and cuffed white jeans, standing atop a sleek red ladder.

  “Hello,” Mae said to her. “I’m Mae.”

  The woman seemed ready to say “I know that,” but then, as if remembering they were on camera, adopted a studied, performative tone. “Hello Mae, I’m Georgia, and I’ll be feeding Mr. Stenton’s shark now.”

  And then, though it was blind, and there was no food yet in the tank, the shark seemed to sense a feast was at hand. It began turning like a cyclone, rising ever-closer to the surface. Mae’s watchers had already risen by 42,000.

  “Someone’s hungry,” Mae said.

  The shark, which had seemed only passingly menacing before, now appeared vicious and wholly sentient, the embodiment of the predatory instinct. Georgia was attempting to look confident, competent, but Mae saw fear and trepidation in her eyes. “Ready down there?” she asked, without taking her eyes off the shark making its way toward her.

  “We’re ready,” Mae said.