The Circle

by Dave Eggers

  “They are. But even then, it’s like both sides of my family are these blackhearted people. I mean, I didn’t even know the British had Irish slaves, did you?”

  “No. I don’t think so. You mean, white Irish slaves?”

  “Thousands of them. My ancestors were the ringleaders or something. They raided Ireland, brought back slaves, sold them all over the world. It’s so fucked up.”

  “Annie—”

  “I mean, I know they’re sure about this because it’s cross-referenced a few thousand ways, but do I look like a descendent of slave owners?”

  “Annie, give yourself a break. Something that happened six hundred years ago has nothing to do with you. Everyone’s bloodline has rough patches, I’m sure. You can’t take it personally.”

  “Sure, but at the very least it’s embarrassing, right? It means that it’s part of me, at least to everyone I know. To the next people I see, this’ll be part of me. They’ll be seeing me, and talking to me, but this will be part of me, too. It’s mapped this new layer onto me, and I don’t feel like that’s fair. It’s like if I knew your dad was a former Klansman—”

  “You’re completely overthinking it. No one, I mean no one, will look at you funny because some ancient ancestor of yours had slaves from Ireland. I mean, it’s so insane, and so distant, that no one will possibly connect you to it. You know how people are. No one can remember anything like that anyway. And to hold you responsible? No chance.”

  “And they killed a bunch of these slaves, too. There’s some story about a rebellion, and that some relative of mine led some mass slaughter of a thousand men and women and children. It’s so sick. I just—”

  “Annie. Annie. You’ve got to calm down. First of all, our time’s up. Audio’s going back up in a second. Secondly, you just cannot worry about this. These people were practically cavemen. Everyone’s cavemen ancestors were assholes.”

  Annie laughed, a loud snort.

  “Promise me you won’t worry?”

  “Sure.”

  “Annie. Don’t worry about this. Promise me.”

  “Okay.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise. I’ll try not to.”

  “Okay. Time.”

  When the news of Annie’s ancestors went out the next day, Mae felt at least partially vindicated. There were some unproductive comments out there, sure, but for the most part the reaction was a collective shrug. No one cared much about how this connected to Annie, but there was new and possibly useful attention brought to the long-forgotten moment in history, when the British went to Ireland and left with human currency.

  Annie seemed to be taking it all in stride. Her zings were positive, and she recorded a brief announcement for her video feed, talking about the surprise in finding out this unfortunate role some distant part of her bloodline played in this grim historical moment. But then she tried to add some perspective and levity to it, and to ensure that this revelation wouldn’t dissuade others from exploring their personal history through PastPerfect. “Everyone’s ancestors were assholes,” she said, and Mae, watching the feed on her bracelet, laughed.

  But Mercer, true to form, was not laughing. Mae hadn’t heard from him in over a month, but then, in Friday’s mail (the only day the post office still operated), was a letter. She didn’t want to read it, because she knew it would be ornery, and accusatory and judgmental. But he’d already written a letter like that, hadn’t he? She opened it, guessing that he couldn’t possibly be worse than he’d been before.

  She was wrong. This time he couldn’t even bring himself to type the Dear before her name.

  Mae,

  I know I said I wouldn’t write again. But now that Annie’s on the verge of ruin, I hope that gives you some pause. Please tell her she should cease her participation in that experiment, which I assure you and her will end badly. We are not meant to know everything, Mae. Did you ever think that perhaps our minds are delicately calibrated between the known and the unknown? That our souls need the mysteries of night and the clarity of day? You people are creating a world of ever-present daylight, and I think it will burn us all alive. There will be no time to reflect, to sleep, to cool. Did it occur to you Circle people, ever, that we can only contain so much? Look at us. We’re tiny. Our heads are tiny, the size of melons. You want these heads of ours to contain everything the world has ever seen? It will not work.

  Mae’s wrist was popping.

  Why do you bother, Mae?

  I’m already bored.

  You’re only feeding Sasquatch. Don’t feed Sasquatch!

  Her heart was already thumping, and she knew she shouldn’t read the rest. But she couldn’t stop.

  I happened to be at my parents’ house when you did your little idea meeting with the Digital Brownshirts. They insisted on watching it; they’re so proud of you, despite how horrifying that session was. Even so, I’m glad I watched that spectacle (just as I’m glad I watched Triumph of the Will). It gave me the last nudge I needed to take the step I’d been planning anyway.

  I’m moving north, to the densest and most uninteresting forest I can find. I know that your cameras are mapping out these areas as they have mapped the Amazon, Antarctica, the Sahara, etc. But at least I’ll have a head start. And when the cameras come, I’ll keep going north.

  Mae, I have to admit that you and yours have won. It’s pretty much over, and now I know that. But before that pitch session, I held out some hope that the madness was limited to your own company, to the brainwashed thousands who work for you or the millions who worship around the golden calf that is the Circle. I held out hope that there were those who would rise up against you people. Or that a new generation would see all this as ludicrous, oppressive, utterly out of control.

  Mae checked her wrist. There were already four new Mercer-hating clubs online. Someone offered to erase his bank account. Just say the word, the message read.

  But now I know that even if someone were to strike you down, if the Circle ended tomorrow, something worse would probably take its place. There are a thousand more Wise Men out there, people with ever-more radical ideas about the criminality of privacy. Every time I think it can’t get worse, I see some nineteen-year-old whose ideas make the Circle seem like some ACLUtopia. And you people (and I know now that you people are most people) are impossible to scare. No amount of surveillance causes the least concern or provokes any resistance.

  It’s one thing to want to measure yourself, Mae—you and your bracelets. I can accept you and yours tracking your own movements, recording everything you do, collecting data on yourself in the interest of … Well, whatever it is you’re trying to do. But it’s not enough, is it? You don’t want just your data, you need mine. You’re not complete without it. It’s a sickness.

  So I’m gone. By the time you read this, I’ll be off the grid, and I expect that others will join me. In fact, I know others will join me. We’ll be living underground, and in the desert, in the woods. We’ll be like refugees, or hermits, some unfortunate but necessary combination of the two. Because this is what we are.

  I expect this is some second great schism, where two humanities will live, apart but parallel. There will be those who live under the surveillance dome you’re helping to create, and those who live, or try to live, apart from it. I’m scared to death for us all.

  Mercer

  She’d read the note on camera, and she knew that her viewers were finding it as bizarre and hilarious as she had. The comments were popping, and there were some good ones. Now the Sasquatch will return to his natural habitat! and Good riddance, Bigfoot. But Mae was so entertained by it that she sought out Francis, who, by the time they saw each other, had already seen the note transcribed and posted onto a half-dozen sub-sites; one watcher in Missoula had already read it while wearing a powdered wig, the background filled with faux-patriotic music. That video had been seen three million times. Mae laughed, watching it twice herself, but found she felt for Mercer. He was stubborn, but
he was not stupid. He was not beyond hope. He was not beyond convincing.

  The next day, Annie left her another paper note, and again they planned to meet in their adjoining stalls. Mae only hoped that since the second round of major revelations, Annie had found a way to contextualize it. Mae saw the tip of Annie’s shoe under the next stall. She turned off her audio.

  Annie’s voice was rough.

  “You heard it got worse, right?”

  “I did hear something. Have you been crying? Annie—”

  “Mae, I don’t think I can handle this. I mean, it was one thing to know about the ancestors in jolly Olde. But there was a part of me that was thinking, you know, that’s fine, my people came to North America, started anew, put all that in the past. But shit, Mae, knowing that they were slave owners here, too? I mean, that is fucking stupid. What kind of people am I from? It has to be some disease in me, too.”

  “Annie. You can’t think about this.”

  “Of course I can. I can’t think of anything else—”

  “Okay. Fine. But first, calm down. And second, you can’t take it personally. You have to separate yourself from it. You have to see it a bit more abstractly.”

  “And I’ve been getting all this crazy hate mail. I got six messages this morning from people calling me Massa Annie. Half the people of color I hired over the years are now suspicious of me. Like I’m some genetically pure intergenerational slave owner! Now I can’t handle having Vickie work for me. I’m letting her go tomorrow.”

  “Annie, you know how crazy this all sounds? I mean, besides, are you sure your ancestors here had black slaves? The slaves weren’t Irish here, too?”

  Annie sighed loudly.

  “No. No. My people went from owning Irish people to owning African people. How’s that? Couldn’t keep my people from owning people. You also saw that they fought for the Confederate side in the Civil War?”

  “I saw that, but there’s millions of people whose ancestors fought for the South. The country was at war, half and half.”

  “Not my half. I mean, do you know the chaos this is wreaking on my family?”

  “But they never took all this family heritage stuff seriously, did they?”

  “Not when they assumed we were bluebloods, Mae! Not when they thought we were Mayflower people with this unimpeachable lineage! Now they take it really fucking seriously. My mom hasn’t left the house in two days. I don’t want to know what they find next.”

  What they found next, two days later, was far worse. Mae didn’t know, ahead of time, precisely what it was, but she did know that Annie knew, and that Annie had sent a very strange zing out into the world. It said Actually, I don’t know if we should know everything. When they met in the stalls, Mae couldn’t believe Annie’s fingers had actually typed that sentence. The Circle couldn’t delete it, of course, but someone—Mae hoped it was Annie—had amended it to say We shouldn’t know everything—without the proper storage ready. You don’t want to lose it!

  “Of course I sent it,” Annie said. “The first one anyway.”

  Mae had held out hope that it was some terrible glitch.

  “How could you have sent that?”

  “It’s what I believe, Mae. You have no idea.”

  “I know I don’t. What idea do you have? You know what kind of shit you’re in? How can you of all people espouse an idea like that? You’re the poster child for open access to the past and now you’re saying … What are you saying, anyway?”

  “Oh fuck, I don’t know. I just know I’m done. I need to shut it down.”

  “Shut what down?”

  “PastPerfect. Anything like it.”

  “You know you can’t.”

  “I’m planning to try.”

  “You must already be in deep shit.”

  “I am. But the Wise Men owe me this one favor. I can’t handle this. I mean, they’ve already quote-unquote relieved me of some of my duties. Whatever. I don’t even care. But if they don’t shut it down I’ll go into some kind of coma. I already feel like I can barely stand or breathe.”

  They sat in silence for a moment. Mae wondered if she shouldn’t leave. Annie was losing her hold on something very central about herself; she felt volatile, capable of rash and irrevocable acts. Talking to her, at all, was a risk.

  Now she heard Annie gasping.

  “Annie. Breathe.”

  “I just told you I can’t. I haven’t slept in two days.”

  “So what happened?” Mae asked.

  “Oh fuck, everything. Nothing. They found some weird stuff with my parents. I mean, a lot of weird stuff.”

  “When does it go live?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Okay. Maybe it’s not as bad as you think.”

  “It’s so much worse than you can imagine.”

  “Tell me. I bet it’s fine.”

  “It’s not fine, Mae. It’s anything but fine. The first thing is that I found out my dad and mom had some kind of open marriage or something. I haven’t even asked them about it. But there are photos and video of them with all kinds of other people. I mean, like, serial adultery on both sides. Is that fine?”

  “How do you know it was an affair? I mean, if they were just walking next to someone? And it was the eighties, right?”

  “More like the nineties. And trust me. It’s definitive.”

  “Like sex photos?”

  “No. But kissy photos. I mean, there’s one with my dad with his hand around some woman’s waist, his other hand on her tit. I mean, sick shit. Other pictures with Mom and some bearded guy, a series of naked photos. Apparently the guy died, had this stash of photos, they were bought at some garage sale and scanned and put in the cloud. Then when they did the global facial-rec, ta-da, Mom’s naked with some biker guy. I mean, the two of them just standing there sometimes, naked, like posing for prom.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “And who took the pictures? There’s some third guy in the room? Who was that? A helpful neighbor?”

  “Have you asked them about it?”

  “No. But that’s the better part of it. I was about to confront them when this other thing popped up. It’s so much worse that I don’t even care about the affairs. I mean, the pictures were nothing compared to the video they found.”

  “What about the video?”

  “Okay. This was one of the rare times the two of them were actually together—at night at least. This is from some video taken at some pier. There was a security camera there, because I guess they store stuff in the warehouses there on the water. So there’s a tape of my parents hanging around this pier at night.”

  “Like a sex tape?”

  “No, it’s much worse. Oh fuck, it’s so bad. Mae, it’s fucking so twisted. You know my parents do this thing every so often—they sort of have a couples night where they go on some bender? They’ve told me about it. They get stoned, drunk, go dancing, stay out all night. It’s on their anniversary every year. Sometimes it’s in the city, sometimes they go somewhere like Mexico. It’s like some all-night thing to keep them young, keep their marriage fresh, whatever.”

  “Okay.”

  “So I know this happened on their anniversary. I was six years old.”

  “So?”

  “It’s one thing if I hadn’t been born—Oh shit. So anyway. I don’t know what they were doing beforehand, but they show up on this surveillance camera around one a.m. They’re drinking a bottle of wine, and kind of dangling their feet over the water, and it all seems pretty innocent and boring for a while. But then this man comes into the frame. He’s like some kind of homeless guy, stumbling around. And my parents look at him, and watch him wandering around and stuff. It looks like he says something to them, and they sort of laugh and go back to their wine. Then nothing happens for a while, and the homeless guy’s out of the frame. Then about ten minutes later he’s back in the frame, and then he falls off the pier and into the water.”

  Mae took in a quick breath. She knew it
was making this worse. “Did your parents see him fall?”

  Now Annie was sobbing. “That’s the problem. They totally did. It happened about three feet from where they were sitting. On the tape you see them get up, sort of lean over, yelling down into the water. You can tell they’re freaking out. Then they sort of look around, to see if there’s a phone or anything.”

  “And was there?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t look like it. They never really left the frame. That’s what’s so fucked up. They see this guy drop into the water and they just stay there. They don’t run to get help, or call the police or anything. They don’t jump in to save the guy. After a few minutes of freaking out, they just sit down again, and my mom puts her head on my dad’s shoulder, and the two of them stay there for another ten minutes or something, and then they get up and leave.”

  “Maybe they were in shock.”

  “Mae, they just got up and left. They never called 911 or anything. There’s no record of it. They never reported it. But the body was found the next day. The guy wasn’t even homeless. He was maybe a little mentally disabled but he lived with his parents and worked at a deli, washing dishes. My parents just watched him drown.”

  Now Annie was choking on her tears.

  “Have you told them about this?”

  “No. I can’t talk to them. They’re really disgusting to me right now.”

  “But it hasn’t been released yet?”

  Annie looked at the time. “It will be soon. Less than twelve hours.”

  “And Bailey said?”

  “He can’t do anything. You know him.”

  “Maybe there’s something I can do,” Mae said, having no idea what. Annie gave no sign she believed Mae capable of slowing or stopping the storm coming her way.

  “It’s so sick. Oh shit,” Annie said, as if the realization had just passed through her. “Now I don’t have parents.”

  When their time was up, Annie returned to her office, where, she said, she planned to lie down indefinitely, and Mae returned to her old pod. She needed to think. She stood in the doorway, where she’d seen Kalden watch her, and she watched the CE newbies, taking comfort in their honest work, their nodding heads. Their murmurs of assent and disapproval gave her a sense of order and rightness. The occasional Circler looked up to smile at her, to wave chastely at the camera, at her audience, before returning to the work at hand. Mae felt a surging pride in them, in the Circle, in attracting pure souls like this. They were open. They were truthful. They did not hide or hoard or obfuscate.