The Circle (35 page)

The audience cheered, and while they did so, three new words, S
HARING
I
S
C
ARING
, 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:

P
RIVACY
I
S
T
HEFT

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?

S
ECRETS
A
RE
L
IES
S
HARING
I
S
C
ARING
P
RIVACY
I
S
T
HEFT

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.

I
T 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.