The Circle

by Dave Eggers

  “Well, this is plain gorgeous,” Bailey said, surveying the coral and vegetation in lemons and blues and burgundies. “Look at these happy creatures. A peaceable kingdom. Seems almost a shame to change it in any way,” he said. Mae glanced quickly to Bailey, and he seemed startled at what he’d said, knowing it was not in the spirit of the present endeavor. He and Stenton exchanged quick looks, and Bailey tried to recover.

  “But we’re striving here for a realistic and holistic look at this world,” he said. “And that means including all of the inhabitants of this ecosystem. So I’m getting an indication from Victor that it’s time to invite the shark to join.”

  Mae looked up to see Victor struggling to open the container’s bottom hatch. The shark was still holding still, a marvel of self-control. And then he began to slide down the lucite ramp. As he did, for a moment Mae was conflicted. She knew this was the natural thing to happen, his joining the rest of those with whom he shared his environment. She knew that it was right and inevitable. But for a moment, she thought it natural in a way seeing a plane fall from the sky can seem natural, too. The horror comes later.

  “Now, for the last piece of this underwater family,” Bailey said. “When the shark is released, we’ll get, for the first time in history, a real look at how life at the bottom of the trench really looks, and how creatures like this cohabitate. Are we ready?” Bailey looked to Stenton, who was standing silently next to him. Stenton nodded brusquely, as if looking to him for the go-ahead was unnecessary.

  Victor released the shark, and, as if it had been eyeing its prey through the plastic, mentally preparing its meal and knowing the precise location of each portion, the shark darted downward and quickly snatched the largest tuna and devoured it in two snaps of its jaws. As the tuna was making its way, visibly, through the shark’s digestive tract, the shark ate two more in rapid succession. A fourth was still in the shark’s jaws when the granular remains of the first were being deposited, like snow, onto the aquarium floor.

  Mae looked then to the bottom of the tank and saw that the octopus and the seahorse progeny were no longer visible. She saw some sign of movement in the holes in the coral, and caught sight of what she thought was a tentacle. Though Mae seemed sure that the shark couldn’t be their predator—after all, Stenton had found them all in close proximity—they were hiding from it as if they knew it, and its plans, quite well. Mae looked up and saw the shark circling the tank, which was now otherwise empty. In the few seconds that Mae had been looking for the octopus and seahorses, the shark had disposed of the other two fish. Their remains fell like dust.

  Bailey laughed nervously. “Well, now I’m wondering—” he said, but stopped. Mae looked up and saw that Stenton’s eyes were narrow and offered no alternative. The process would not be interrupted. She looked to Kalden, or Ty, whose eyes hadn’t left the tank. He was watching the proceedings placidly, as if he had seen it before and knew every outcome.

  “Okay,” Bailey said. “Our shark is a very hungry fellow, and I would be worried about the other occupants of our little world here if I didn’t know better. But I do know better. I’m standing next to one of the great underwater explorers, a man who knows what he’s doing.” Mae watched Bailey speak. He was looking at Stenton, his eyes looking for any give, any sign that he might call this off, or offer some explanation or assurance. But Stenton was staring at the shark, admiring.

  Quick and savage movement brought Mae’s eyes back to the tank. The shark’s nose was deep in the coral now, attacking it with a brutal force.

  “Oh no,” Bailey said.

  The coral soon split open and the shark plunged in, coming away, instantaneously, with the octopus, which it dragged into the open area of the tank, as if to give everyone—Mae and her watchers and the Wise Men—a better view as it tore the animal apart.

  “Oh god,” Bailey said, quieter now.

  Intentionally or not, the octopus presented a challenge to its fate. The shark ripped off an arm, then seemed to get a mouthful of the octopus’s head, only to find, seconds later, that the octopus was still alive and largely intact, behind him. But not for long.

  “Oh no. Oh no,” Bailey whispered.

  The shark turned and, in a flurry, ripped its prey’s tentacles off, one by one, until the octopus was dead, a shredded mass of milky white matter. The shark took the rest of it in two snatches of its mouth, and the octopus was no more.

  A kind of whimper came from Bailey, and without turning her shoulders, Mae looked over to find that Bailey was now turned away, his palms against his eyes. Stenton, though, was looking at the shark with a mixture of fascination and pride, like a parent watching, for the first time, his child doing something particularly impressive, something he’d hoped for and expected but that came delightfully sooner.

  Above the tank, Victor looked tentative, and was trying to catch Stenton’s eye. He seemed to be wondering what Mae was wondering, which was whether they should somehow separate the shark from the seahorse, before the seahorse, too, was consumed. But when Mae turned to him, Stenton was still watching, with no change of expression.

  In a few more seconds, in a series of urgent thrusts, the shark had broken another coral arch and extracted the seahorse, which had no defenses and was eaten in two bites, first its delicate head, then its curved, papier-mâché torso and tail.

  Then, like a machine going about its work, the shark circled and stabbed until he had devoured the thousand babies, and the seaweed, and the coral, and the anemones. It ate everything, and deposited the remains quickly, carpeting the empty aquarium in a low film of white ash.

  “Well,” Ty said, “that was about what I imagined would happen.” He seemed unshaken, even buoyant as he shook Stenton’s hand, and then Bailey’s, and then, while still holding Bailey’s hand with his right hand, he took Mae’s with his left, as if the three of them were about to dance. Mae felt something in her palm, and quickly closed her fingers around it. Then he pulled away and left.

  “I better head out, too,” Bailey said in a whisper. He turned, dazed, and walked down the darkened corridor.

  Afterward, when the shark was alone in the tank, and was circling, still ravenous, never stopping, Mae wondered how long she should remain in place, allowing the watchers to watch this. But she decided that as long as Stenton remained, she would, too. And he stayed for a long while. He couldn’t get enough of the shark, its anxious circling.

  “Until next time,” Stenton said finally. He nodded to Mae, and then to her watchers, who were now one hundred million, many of them terrified, many more in awe and wanting more of the same.

  In the bathroom stall, with the lens trained on the door, Mae brought Ty’s note close to her face, out of view of her watchers. He insisted on seeing her, alone, and provided detailed directions for where they should meet. When she was ready, he’d written, she need only leave the bathroom, and then turn and say, into her live audio, “I’m going back.” It would imply she was returning to the bathroom, for some unnamed hygienic emergency. And at that moment he would kill her feed, and any SeeChange cameras that might see her, for thirty minutes. It would provoke a minor clamor, but it had to be done. Her life, he said, was at stake, and Annie’s, and her parents’. “Everyone and everything,” he’d written, “is teetering on the precipice.”

  This would be her last mistake. She knew it was a mistake to meet him, especially off-camera. But something about the shark had unsettled her, had left her susceptible to bad decisions. If only someone could make these decisions for her—somehow eliminate the doubt, the possibility of failure. But she had to know how Ty had pulled all this off, didn’t she? Perhaps all this was some test? It made a certain sense. If she were being groomed for great things, wouldn’t they test her? She knew they would.

  So she followed his directions. She left the bathroom, told her watchers she was returning, and when her feed went dead, she followed his directions. She descended as she had with Kalden that one strange night, tracing the path
they’d taken when he’d first brought her to the room, far underground, where they housed and ran cool water through Stewart and everything he’d seen. When Mae arrived, she found Kalden, or Ty, waiting for her, his back to the red box. He’d taken off the wool hat, revealing his grey-white hair, but he was still wearing his hoodie, and the combination of the two men, Ty and Kalden, in one figure, repulsed her, and when he began walking toward her, she yelled “No!”

  He stopped.

  “Stay there,” she said.

  “I’m not dangerous, Mae.”

  “I don’t know anything about you.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you who I was. But I didn’t lie.”

  “You told me your name was Kalden! That’s not a lie?”

  “Besides that, I never lied.”

  “Besides that? Besides lying about your identity?”

  “I think you know I have no choice here.”

  “What kind of name is Kalden, anyway? You get it off some baby-name site?”

  “I did. You like it?”

  He smiled an unnerving smile. Mae had the feeling that she shouldn’t be here, that she should leave immediately.

  “I think I need to go,” she said, and stepped toward the stairs. “I feel like this is some horrific prank.”

  “Mae, think about it. Here’s my license.” He handed her his driver’s license. It showed a clean-shaven, dark-haired man with glasses who looked more or less like what she remembered Ty looked like, the Ty from the video feeds, the old photos, the portrait in oil outside Bailey’s library. The name read Tyson Matthew Gospodinov. “Look at me. No resemblance?” He retreated to the cave-within-a-cave they’d shared and returned with a pair of glasses. “See?” he said. “Now it’s obvious, right?” As if answering Mae’s next question, he said, “I’ve always been a very average-looking guy. You know this. And then I get rid of the glasses, the hoodies. I change my look, the way I move. But most importantly, my hair went grey. And why do you think that happened?”

  “I have no idea,” Mae said.

  Ty swept his arms around, encompassing everything around them, the vast campus above. “All this. The fucking shark that eats the world.”

  “Do Bailey and Stenton know you’re going around with some other name?” Mae asked.

  “Of course. Yes. They expect me to be here. I’m not technically allowed to leave campus. As long as I’m here, they’re happy.”

  “Does Annie know?”

  “No.”

  “So I’m—”

  “You’re the third person who knows.”

  “And you’re telling me why?”

  “Because you have great influence here, and because you have to help. You’re the only one who can slow all this down.”

  “Slow what down? The company you created?”

  “Mae, I didn’t intend any of this to happen. And it’s moving too fast. This idea of Completion, it’s far beyond what I had in mind when I started all this, and it’s far beyond what’s right. It has to be brought back into some kind of balance.”

  “First of all, I don’t agree. Secondly, I can’t help.”

  “Mae, the Circle can’t close.”

  “What are you talking about? How can you say this now? If you’re Ty, most of this was your idea.”

  “No. No. I was trying to make the web more civil. I was trying to make it more elegant. I got rid of anonymity. I combined a thousand disparate elements into one unified system. But I didn’t picture a world where Circle membership was mandatory, where all government and all life was channeled through one network—”

  “I’m leaving,” Mae said, and turned. “And I don’t see why you just don’t leave, too. Leave everything. If you don’t believe in all this, then leave. Go to the woods.”

  “That didn’t work for Mercer, did it?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Sorry. I’m sorry. But he’s why I contacted you now. Don’t you see that’s just one of the consequences of all this? There will be more Mercers. So many more. So many people who don’t want to be found but who will be. So many people who wanted no part of all this. That’s what’s new. There used to be the option of opting out. But now that’s over. Completion is the end. We’re closing the circle around everyone—it’s a totalitarian nightmare.”

  “And it’s my fault?”

  “No, no. Not at all. But you’re now the ambassador. You’re the face of it. The benign, friendly face of it all. And the closing of the Circle—it’s what you and your friend Francis made possible. Your mandatory Circle account idea, and his chip. TruYouth? It’s sick, Mae. Don’t you see? All the kids get a chip embedded in them, for safety, when they’re infants. And yes, it’ll save lives. But then, what, you think they suddenly remove them when they’re eighteen? No. In the interest of education and safety, everything they’ve done will be recorded, tracked, logged, analyzed—it’s permanent. Then, when they’re old enough to vote, to participate, their membership is mandatory. That’s where the Circle closes. Everyone will be tracked, cradle to grave, with no possibility of escape.”

  “You really sound like Mercer now. This kind of paranoia—”

  “But I know more than Mercer. Don’t you think if someone like me, someone who invented most of this shit, is scared, don’t you think you should be scared, too?”

  “No. I think you lost a step.”

  “Mae, so many of the things I invented I honestly did for fun, out of some perverse game of whether or not they’d work, whether people would use them. I mean, it was like setting up a guillotine in the public square. You don’t expect a thousand people to line up to put their heads in it.”

  “Is that how you see this?”

  “No, sorry. That’s a bad comparison. But some of the things we did, I just—I did just to see if anyone would actually use them, would acquiesce. When they did buy in, half the time I couldn’t believe it. And then it was too late. There was Bailey and Stenton and the IPO. And then it was just too fast, and there was enough money to make any dumb idea real. Mae, I want you to imagine where all this is going.”

  “I know where it’s going.”

  “Mae, close your eyes.”

  “No.”

  “Mae, please. Close your eyes.”

  She closed her eyes.

  “I want you to connect these dots and see if you see what I see. Picture this. The Circle has been devouring all competitors for years, correct? It only makes the company stronger. Already, 90 percent of the world’s searches go through the Circle. Without competitors, this will increase. Soon it’ll be nearly 100 percent. Now, you and I both know that if you can control the flow of information, you can control everything. You can control most of what anyone sees and knows. If you want to bury some piece of information, permanently, that’s two seconds’ work. If you want to ruin anyone, that’s five minutes’ work. How can anyone rise up against the Circle if they control all the information and accesss to it? They want everyone to have a Circle account, and they’re well on their way to making it illegal not to. What happens then? What happens when they control all searches, and have full access to all data about every person? When they know every move everyone makes? If all monetary transactions, all health and DNA information, every piece of one’s life, good or bad, when every word uttered flows through one channel?”

  “But there are a thousand protections to prevent all of this. It’s just not possible. I mean, governments will make sure—”

  “Governments who are transparent? Legislators who owe their reputations to the Circle? Who could be ruined the moment they speak out? What do you think happened to Williamson? Remember her? She threatens the Circle monopoly and, surprise, the feds find incriminating stuff on her computer. You think that’s a coincidence? That’s about the hundredth person Stenton’s done that to. Mae, once the Circle’s complete, that’s it. And you helped complete it. This democracy thing, or Demoxie, whatever it is, good god. Under the guise of having every voice heard, you create mob rule, a
filterless society where secrets are crimes. It’s brilliant, Mae. I mean, you are brilliant. You’re what Stenton and Bailey have been hoping for from the start.”

  “But Bailey—”

  “Bailey believes that life will be better, will be perfect, when everyone has unfettered access to everyone and everything they know. He genuinely believes that the answers to every life question can be found among other people. He truly believes that openness, that complete and uninterrupted access among all humans will help the world. That this is what the world’s been waiting for, the moment when every soul is connected. This is his rapture, Mae! Don’t you see how extreme that view is? His idea is radical, and in another era would have been a fringe notion espoused by an eccentric adjunct professor somewhere: that all information, personal or not, should be known by all. Knowledge is property and no one can own it. Infocommunism. And he’s entitled to that opinion. But paired with ruthless capitalistic ambition—”

  “So it’s Stenton?”

  “Stenton professionalized our idealism, monetized our utopia. He’s the one who saw the connection between our work and politics, and between politics and control. Public-private leads to private-private, and soon you have the Circle running most or even all government services, with incredible private-sector efficiency and an insatiable appetite. Everyone becomes a citizen of the Circle.”

  “And that’s so bad? If everyone has equal access to services, to information, we finally have a chance at equality. No information should cost anything. There should be no barriers to knowing everything, to accessing all—”

  “And if everyone’s tracked—”

  “Then there’s no crime. No murder, no kidnapping and rape. No kids ever victimized again. No more missing persons. I mean, that alone—”

  “But don’t you see what happened to your friend Mercer? He was pursued to the ends of the earth and now he’s gone.”

  “But this is just the pivot of history. Have you talked to Bailey about this? I mean, during any major human turning point, there’s upheaval. Some get left behind, some choose to be left behind.”