by Dave Eggers
“So you think everyone should be tracked, should be watched.”
“I think everything and everyone should be seen. And to be seen, we need to be watched. The two go hand in hand.”
“But who wants to be watched all the time?”
“I do. I want to be seen. I want proof I existed.”
“Mae.”
“Most people do. Most people would trade everything they know, everyone they know—they’d trade it all to know they’ve been seen, and acknowledged, that they might even be remembered. We all know we die. We all know the world is too big for us to be significant. So all we have is the hope of being seen, or heard, even for a moment.”
“But Mae. We saw every creature in that tank, didn’t we? We saw them devoured by a beast that turned them to ash. Don’t you see that everything that goes into that tank, with that beast, with this beast, will meet the same fate?”
“So what exactly do you want from me?”
“When you have the maximum amount of viewers, I want you to read this statement.” He handed Mae a piece of paper, on which he’d written, in crude all capitals, a list of assertions under the headline “The Rights of Humans in a Digital Age.” Mae scanned it, catching passages: “We must all have the right to anonymity.” “Not every human activity can be measured.” “The ceaseless pursuit of data to quantify the value of any endeavor is catastrophic to true understanding.” “The barrier between public and private must remain unbreachable.” At the end she found one line, written in red ink: “We must all have the right to disappear.”
“So you want me to read all this to the watchers?”
“Yes,” Kalden said, his eyes wild.
“And then what?”
“I have a series of steps that we can take together that can begin to take all this apart. I know everything that’s ever happened here, Mae, and there’s plenty that’s gone on that would convince anyone, no matter how blind, that the Circle needs to be dismantled. I know I can do it. I’m the only one who can do it, but I need your help.”
“And then what?”
“Then you and I go somewhere. I have so many ideas. We’ll vanish. We can hike through Tibet. We can bike through the Mongolian steppe. We can sail around the world in a boat we built ourselves.”
Mae pictured all this. She pictured the Circle being taken apart, sold off amid scandal, thirteen thousand people out of jobs, the campus overtaken, broken up, turned into a college or mall or something worse. And finally she pictured life on a boat with this man, sailing the world, untethered, but when she tried to, she saw, instead, the couple on the barge she’d met months ago on the bay. Out there, alone, living under a tarp, drinking wine from paper cups, naming seals, reminiscing about island fires.
At that moment, Mae knew what she needed to do.
“Kalden, are you sure we’re not being heard?”
“Of course not.”
“Okay, good. Good. I see everything clearly now.”
BOOK III
TO HAVE GOTTEN so close to apocalypse—it rattled her still. Yes, Mae had averted it, she’d been braver than she thought possible, but her nerves, these many months later, were still frayed. What if Kalden hadn’t reached out to her when he did? What if he hadn’t trusted her? What if he’d taken matters into his own hands, or worse, entrusted his secret to someone else? Someone without her integrity? Without her strength, her resolve, her loyalty?
In the quiet of the clinic, sitting next to Annie, Mae’s mind wandered. There was serenity here, with the rhythmic hush of the respirator, the occasional door opening or closing, the hum of the machines that kept Annie alive. She’d collapsed at her desk, was found on the floor, catatonic, and was rushed here, where the care surpassed what she could have received anywhere else. Since then, she’d stabilized, and the prognosis was strong. The cause of the coma was still a subject of some debate, Dr. Villalobos had said, but most likely, it was caused by stress, or shock, or simple exhaustion. The Circle doctors were confident Annie would emerge from it, as were a thousand doctors worldwide who had watched her vitals, encouraged by the frequent flittering of her eyelashes, the occasional twitch of a finger. Next to her EKG, there was a screen with an ever-lengthening string of good wishes from fellow humans from all over the world, most or all of whom, Mae thought wistfully, Annie would never know.
Mae looked at her friend, at her unchanging face, her glistening skin, the ribbed tube emerging from her mouth. She looked wonderfully peaceful, sleeping a restful sleep, and for a brief moment Mae felt a twinge of envy. She wondered what Annie was thinking. Doctors had said that she was likely dreaming; they’d been measuring steady brain activity during the coma, but what precisely was happening in her mind was unknown to all, and Mae couldn’t help feeling some annoyance about this. There was a monitor visible from where Mae sat, a real-time picture of Annie’s mind, bursts of color appearing periodically, implying that extraordinary things were happening in there. But what was she thinking?
A knock startled her. She looked beyond Annie’s prone form to find Francis behind the glass, in the viewing area. He raised a tentative hand, and Mae waved. She would see him later, at an all-campus event to celebrate the latest Clarification milestone. Ten million people were now transparent worldwide, the movement irreversible.
Annie’s role in making it possible could not be overstated, and Mae wished she could witness it. There was so much Mae wanted to tell Annie. With a duty that felt holy, she’d told the world about Kalden being Ty, about his bizarre claims and misguided efforts to derail the completion of the Circle. Remembering it now, it seemed like some kind of nightmare, being so far under the earth with that madman, disconnected from her watchers and the rest of the world. But Mae had feigned her cooperation and had escaped, and immediately told Bailey and Stenton about it all. With their customary compassion and vision, they’d allowed Ty to stay on campus, in an advisory role, with a secluded office and no specific duties. Mae hadn’t seen him since their subterranean encounter, and did not care to.
Mae had not reached her parents in a few months now, but it would be only a matter of time. They would find each other, soon enough, in a world where everyone could know each other truly and wholly, without secrets, without shame and without the need for permission to see or to know, without the selfish hoarding of life—any corner of it, any moment of it. All of that would be, so soon, replaced by a new and glorious openness, a world of perpetual light. Completion was imminent, and it would bring peace, and it would bring unity, and all that messiness of humanity until now, all those uncertainties that accompanied the world before the Circle, would be only a memory.
Another burst of color appeared on the screen monitoring the workings of Annie’s mind. Mae reached out to touch her forehead, marveling at the distance this flesh put between them. What was going on in that head of hers? It was exasperating, really, Mae thought, not knowing. It was an affront, a deprivation, to herself and to the world. She would bring this up with Stenton and Bailey, with the Gang of 40, at the earliest opportunity. They needed to talk about Annie, the thoughts she was thinking. Why shouldn’t they know them? The world deserved nothing less and would not wait.
A Note About the Author
Dave Eggers grew up near Chicago and graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the founder of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing house in San Francisco that produces books, a quarterly journal of new writing (McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern), and a monthly magazine, The Believer. McSweeney’s publishes Voice of Witness, a nonprofit book series that uses oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. In 2002, he cofounded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit youth writing and tutoring center in San Francisco’s Mission District. Sister centers have since opened in seven other American cities under the umbrella of 826 National, and like-minded centers have opened in Dublin, London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Birmingham, Alabama, among other locations. His work has been nominated for the National Bo
ok Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, France’s Prix Médicis, Germany’s Albatross Prize, the National Magazine Award, and the American Book Award. Eggers lives in Northern California with his family.
Other titles by Dave Eggers available in eBook format
A Hologram for the King • 978-1-938073-31-1
How We Are Hungry • 978-0-307-42630-7
What Is the What • 978-0-307-39036-3
The Wild Things • 978-0-307-47756-9
You Shall Know Our Velocity • 978-0-307-42608-6
Zeitoun • 978-0-307-73943-8
Visit: www.mcsweeneys.net
For more information, please visit www.aaknopf.com
BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR
NOVELS
The Circle
A Hologram for the King
What Is the What
You Shall Know Our Velocity!
STORIES
How We Are Hungry
How the Water Feels to the Fishes
NONFICTION
Zeitoun
FOR ALL AGES
The Wild Things
ORAL HISTORY (AS CO-EDITOR)
Surviving Justice: America’s Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated
Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers
AS EDITOR
The Best American Nonrequired Reading
The Best of McSweeney’s
MEMOIR
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
