The Circle

by Dave Eggers

  Mae glanced at her wrist. She had nine minutes until she had to see Dr. Villalobos.

  “Anything else you’d like to talk about?” she asked.

  “What else?” Annie said. “Well let me think …”

  Annie tilted her head, as if surprised, and mildly annoyed, that this faux-visit was still continuing. But then something came over her, as if finally settling into what was happening—that she was stuck on camera and had to assume her mantle as company spokesperson.

  “Okay, there’s another very cool program that we’ve been hinting at for a while, a system called PastPerfect. And in Germany I was working out some last hurdles to help it happen. We’re currently looking for the right volunteer here within the Circle to try it out, but when we find the right person, it’ll mean the start of a very new era for the Circle, and, not to be overly dramatic about it, for humankind.”

  “Not dramatic at all!” Mae said. “Can you say anything more about it?”

  “Sure, Mae. Thank you for asking,” Annie said, looking briefly at her shoes before raising her eyes back to Mae, with a professional smile. “I can say that the basic idea is to take the power of the Circle community and to map not just the present but the past, too. We’re right now digitizing every photo, every newsreel, every amateur video in every archive in this country and Europe—I mean, we’re doing our best at least. The task is herculean, but once we have a critical mass, and with facial recognition advances, we can, we hope, identify pretty much everyone in every photo and every video. You want to find every picture of your great-grandparents, we can make the archive searchable, and you can—we expect, we bet—then gain a greater understanding of them. Maybe you catch them in a crowd at the 1912 World’s Fair. Maybe you find video of your parents at a baseball game in 1974. The hope, in the end, is to fill in your memory and the historical record. And with the help of DNA and far better genealogical software, within the year we’re hoping that anyone can quickly access every available piece of information about their family lineage, all images, all video and film, with one search request.”

  “And I imagine that when everyone else joins in, the Circle participants that is, the gaps will quickly be filled.” Mae smiled, her eyes telling Annie she was doing great.

  “That’s right, Mae,” Annie said, her voice stabbing at the space between them, “like any project online, most of the completion will be done by the digital community. We’re gathering our own millions of photos and videos, but the rest of the world will provide billions more. We expect that with even partial participation, we’ll be able to fill in most historical holes easily. If you’re looking for all the residents of a certain building in Poland, circa 1913, and you’re missing one, it won’t take long to triangulate that last person by cross-referencing from all the other data we’ll get.”

  “Very exciting.”

  “Yes, it is,” Annie said, and flashed the whites of her eyes, urging Mae to wrap all this up.

  “But you don’t have the guinea pig yet?” Mae asked.

  “Not yet. For the first person, we’re looking for someone whose family goes back pretty far in the United States. Just because we know we’ll have more complete access to records here than in some other countries.”

  “And this is part of the Circle’s plan to complete everything this year? It’s still on schedule?”

  “It is. PastPerfect is just about ready to use now. And with all the other aspects of Completion, it looks like the beginning of next year. Eight months and we’ll be done. But you never know: the way things are going, with the help of so many Circlers out there, we could finish ahead of time.”

  Mae smiled, nodded, and she and Annie shared a long, strained moment, when Annie’s eyes again asked how long they needed to go on with this semiperformative dialogue.

  Outside, the sun broke through the clouds, and the light through the window shone down on Annie’s face. Mae saw, then, for the first time, how old she looked. Her face was drawn, her skin pale. Annie was not yet twenty-seven but there were bags under her eyes. In this light, she seemed to have aged five years in the last two months.

  Annie took Mae’s hand, and dug her fingernails into her palm just enough to get her attention. “I actually have to use the bathroom. Come with?”

  “Sure. I have to go, too.”

  Though Mae’s transparency was complete, in that she could not turn off the visual or audio feeds at any time, there were a few exceptions, insisted upon by Bailey. One was during bathroom usage, or at least time spent on the toilet. The video feed was to remain on, because, Bailey insisted, the camera would be trained on the back of the stall door, so it hardly mattered. But the audio would be turned off, sparing Mae, and the audience, the sounds.

  Mae entered the stall, Annie entered the one next to her, and Mae deactivated her audio. The rule was that she had up to three minutes of silence; more than that would provoke concern from viewers and Circlers alike.

  “So how are you?” Mae asked. She couldn’t see Annie, but her toes, looking crooked and in need of a pedicure attention, were visible under the door.

  “Great. Great. You?”

  “Good.”

  “Well, you should be good,” Annie said. “You are killing it!”

  “You think?”

  “C’mon. False modesty won’t work here. You should be psyched.”

  “Okay. I am.”

  “I mean, you’re like a meteor here. It’s insane. People are coming to me trying to get to you. It’s just … so crazy.”

  Something had crept into Annie’s voice that Mae recognized as envy, or its close cousin. Mae ran through a string of possibilities of what she could say in response. Nothing was right. I couldn’t have done it without you would not work; it sounded both self-aggrandizing and condescending. In the end, she chose to change the subject.

  “Sorry about asking stupid questions back there,” Mae said.

  “It’s okay. But you put me on the spot.”

  “I know. I just—I saw you and wanted to spend time with you. And I didn’t know what else to ask about. So are you really okay? You look wiped out.”

  “Thank you, Mae. You know how much I like to be told seconds after I appear in front of your millions that I look terrible. Thank you. You’re sweet.”

  “I’m just worried. Have you been sleeping?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’m off-schedule. I’m jet-lagged.”

  “Is there anything I can do? Let me take you out to eat.”

  “Take me out to eat? With your camera and me looking so terrible? That sounds fantastic, but no.”

  “Let me do something for you.”

  “No, no. I just need to get caught up.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  “Oh you know, the usual.”

  “The regulatory stuff went well? They were really putting a lot on you out there. I worried.”

  A chill swept through Annie’s voice. “Well, you had no reason to worry. I’ve been doing this for a while now.”

  “I didn’t mean I was worried in that way.”

  “Well, don’t worry in any way.”

  “I know you can handle it.”

  “Thank you! Mae, your confidence in me will be the wind beneath my wings.”

  Mae chose to ignore the sarcasm. “So when do I get to see you?”

  “Soon. We’ll make something happen.”

  “Tonight? Please?”

  “Not tonight. I’m just gonna crash and get fresh for tomorrow. I have a bunch of stuff. There’s all the new work on Completion, and …”

  “Completing the Circle?”

  There was a long pause, during which Mae was sure that Annie was relishing this piece of news, unknown to Mae.

  “Yeah. Bailey didn’t tell you?” Annie said. A certain exasperating music had entered her voice.

  “I don’t know,” Mae said, her heart burning. “Maybe he did.”

  “Well, they’re feeling very close now. I was out there removin
g some of the last barriers. The Wise Men think we’re down to the last few hurdles.”

  “Oh. I think I might have heard that,” Mae said, hearing herself, hearing how petty she sounded. But she was jealous. Of course she was. Why would she have access to information that Annie did? She knew she had no right to it, but still, she wanted it, and felt she was closer to it than this, than hearing about it from Annie, who had been halfway around the world for three weeks. The omission threw her back to some ignominious spot at the Circle, some plebeian place of being a spokeswoman, a public shill.

  “So you’re sure I can’t do anything for you? Maybe some kind of mudpack to help with the puffiness under your eyes?” Mae hated herself for saying it, but it felt so good in that moment, like an itch scratched hard.

  Annie cleared her throat. “You’re so kind,” she said. “But I should get going.”

  “You sure?”

  “Mae. I don’t want this to sound rude, but the best thing for me right now is to get back to my desk so I can get back to work.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m not saying that in a rude way. I actually just need to get caught up.”

  “No, I know. I get it. That’s fine. I’ll see you tomorrow anyway. At the Concept Kingdom meeting.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a Concept King—”

  “No. I know what it is. You’re going?”

  “I am. Bailey thought I should go.”

  “And broadcast it?”

  “Of course. Is that a problem?”

  “No. No,” Annie said, clearly stalling, processing. “I’m just surprised. Those meetings are full of sensitive intellectual property. Maybe he’s planning to have you attend the beginning or something. I can’t imagine …”

  Annie’s toilet flushed, and Mae saw that she’d stood up.

  “You leaving?”

  “Yeah. I’m really so late I want to puke now.”

  “Okay. Don’t puke.”

  Annie hurried to the door and was gone.

  Mae had four minutes to get to Dr. Villalobos. She stood, turned her audio back on, and left the bathroom.

  Then she walked back in, silenced her audio, sat down in the same stall, and gave herself a minute to get herself together. Let people think she was constipated. She didn’t care. She was sure Annie was crying by now, wherever she was. Mae was sobbing, and was cursing Annie, cursing every blond inch of her, her smug sense of entitlement. So what that she’d been at the Circle longer. They were peers now, but Annie couldn’t accept it. Mae would have to make sure she did.

  It was 2:02 when she arrived.

  “Hello Mae,” Dr. Villalobos said, greeting her in the clinic lobby. “I see your heart rate is normal, and I imagine with your jog over here, all your viewers are getting some interesting data, too. Come in.”

  In retrospect, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that Dr. Villalobos had become a viewers’ favorite, too. With her extravagant curves, her sultry eyes and harmonica voice, she was volcanic onscreen. She was the doctor everyone, especially straight men, wished they’d had. Though TruYou had made lewd comments almost impossible for anyone wanting to keep their job or spouse, Dr. Villalobos brought out a genteel, but no less demonstrative, brand of appreciation. So good to see the good doctor! one man wrote as Mae entered the office. Let the examination begin, said another, braver, soul. And Dr. Villalobos, while putting on a show of brisk professionalism, seemed to enjoy it, too. Today she was wearing a zippered blouse that displayed an amount of her ample chest that at a proper distance was appropriate but, seen through Mae’s close camera, was somehow obscene.

  “So your vitals have been looking good,” she said to Mae.

  Mae was sitting on the examination table, the doctor standing before her. Looking at her wrist, Mae checked the image her viewers were getting, and she knew the men would be pleased. As if realizing the picture might be getting too provocative, Dr. Villalobos turned to the wallscreen. On it, a few hundred data points were displayed.

  “Your step count could be better,” she said. “You’re averaging only 5,300, when you should be at 10,000. Someone your age, especially, should be even higher than that.”

  “I know,” Mae said. “It’s just been busy lately.”

  “Okay. But let’s bring those steps up. As a promise to me? Now, because we’re talking to all your watchers now, I’d like to tout the overall program your own data feeds into, Mae. It’s called the Complete Health Data program, or CHAD for short. Chad was an ex of mine, and Chad, if you’re out there, I didn’t name it for you.”

  Mae’s wrist went wild with messages. Chad, you fool.

  “Through CHAD, we get real-time data on everyone at the Circle. Mae, you and the newbies were the first to get the new wristbands, but since then, we’ve equipped everyone else at the Circle. And this has enabled us to get perfect and complete data on the eleven thousand people here. Can you imagine? The first boon has been that when the flu arrived on campus last week, we knew in minutes who brought it. We sent her home and no one else was infected. If only we could prevent people from bringing germs onto campus, right? If they never left, getting dirty out there, then we’d be all set. But let me get off my soapbox and focus on you, Mae.”

  “As long as the news is good,” Mae said, and tried to smile. But she was uneasy and wanted to move all this along.

  “Well, I think it’s good,” the doctor said. “This comes from a watcher in Scotland. He’d been tracking your vitals, and cross-referencing with your DNA markers, he realized that the way you’re eating, particularly nitrates, is elevating your propensity for cancer.”

  “Jesus. Really? Is that the bad news I’m here for?”

  “No, no! Don’t worry. It’s easily solved. You don’t have cancer and probably won’t get it. But you know you have a marker for gastrointestinal cancer, just an increased risk, and this researcher in Glasgow, who’d been following you and your vitals, saw that you’re eating salami and other meats with nitrates that might be tipping you toward cellular mutation.”

  “You keep scaring me.”

  “Oh god I’m sorry! I don’t mean to. But thank god he was watching. I mean, we’re watching, too, and we’re getting better at watching all the time. But the beauty of having so many friends out there, as you do, is that one of them, five thousand miles away, has helped you avert a growing risk.”

  “So no more nitrates.”

  “Right. Let’s skip the nitrates. I’ve zinged you a list of foods that contain them, and your watchers can see, too. They should always be eaten in moderation, but should be avoided altogether if there’s any history of or risk of cancer. I hope you’ll be sure to convey this to your parents, in case they haven’t been checking their own Zing feed.”

  “Oh, I’m sure they have,” Mae said.

  “Okay, and this is the not-so-good news. It’s not about you or your health. It’s your parents. They’re fine, but I want to show you something.” The doctor brought up the SeeChange camera feeds in Mae’s parents’ house, set up a month into her father’s treatment. The medical team at the Circle was taking a strong interest in her father’s case, and wanted as much data as it could get. “You see anything wrong?”

  Mae scanned the screen. Where a grid of sixteen images should have been visible, twelve were blank. “There are only four working,” she said.

  “Correct,” said the doctor.

  Mae watched the four feeds for signs of her parents. She saw none. “Has tech been there to check?”

  “No need. We saw them do it. For each one, they reached up and put some kind of cover over them. Maybe just some sticker or fabric. Did you know about this?”

  “I didn’t. I’m so sorry. They shouldn’t have done this.”

  Instinctively, Mae checked her current viewership: 1,298,001. It always spiked during the visits to Dr. Villalobos. Now all these people knew. Mae felt her face flush.

  “Have you heard from your folks recently?” Dr. Villalobos ask
ed. “Our records say you haven’t. But maybe—”

  “Not in the last few days,” Mae said. In fact, she hadn’t been in touch for over a week. She’d tried to call them, to no avail. She’d zinged and received no response.

  “Would you be willing to go visit?” the doctor asked. “As you know, good medical care is hard to provide when we’re in the dark.”

  Mae was driving home, having left work at five—something she hadn’t done in weeks—and was thinking of her parents, what kind of madness had overtaken them, and she was worried that somehow Mercer’s own madness had infected them. How dare they disconnect cameras! After all she’d done to help, after all the Circle had done to bend all rules to come to their aid! And what would Annie say?

  Damn her, Mae thought as she made her way home, the air growing warmer as the distance grew between her and the Pacific. Mae had set up her lens on the car dash, inserting it into a special mount created for her time in the car. That fucking debutante. This was bad timing. Annie would likely find some way to turn all this to her advantage. Just when her envy of Mae—and it was that, it was so abundantly obvious—was growing, she could cut Mae down to size again. Mae and her nothing town, her parking-garage parents who couldn’t keep their screens operational, who couldn’t keep themselves healthy. Who took a monumental gift, premium health care, for free, and abused it. Mae knew what Annie was thinking in her little entitled blond head: You just can’t help some people.

  Annie’s family line went back to the Mayflower, her ancestors having settled this country, and their ancestors having owned some vast swath of England. Their blood was blue all the way back, it seemed, to the invention of the wheel. In fact, if anyone’s bloodline had invented the wheel, it would have been Annie’s. It would make absolute and perfect sense and would surprise no one.

  Mae had discovered all this one Thanksgiving at Annie’s house, with twenty-odd relatives there, all with their thin noses, their pink skin, their weak eyes hidden behind forty lenses, when she became aware, during an appropriately self-effacing conversation—for Annie’s family was equally unwilling to talk too much or care too much about their lineage—that some distant relative of theirs had been at the very first Thanksgiving.