The Circle (37 page)

That would give her a few minutes to think. Periodically, she would focus her lens
on something like this, a game or demonstration or speech, and this might allow her
mind to wander, while the watchers watched. She checked the view on her wrist, and
saw that her watchers, 432,028, were within the average, and there were no urgent
comments, so she permitted herself three minutes before she had to retake control
of the feed. With a wide smile—for she was surely visible on three or four outdoor
SeeChanges—she took a breath. This was a new skill she’d acquired, the ability to
look, to the outside world, utterly serene and even cheerful, while, in her skull,
all was chaos.
She wanted to call Annie. But she couldn’t call Annie. She wanted Kalden. She wanted
to be alone with Kalden. She wanted to be back in that bathroom sitting on him, feeling
the crown of him push through. But he was not normal. He was some kind of spy here.
Some kind of anarchist, doomsayer. What had he meant when he warned of the completion
of the Circle? She didn’t even know what Completion meant. No one did. The Wise Men
had recently begun to hint about it, though. One day, in new tiles all over campus,
cryptic messages had appeared: T
HINK
C
OMPLETION
and C
OMPLETE THE
C
IRCLE
and T
HE
C
IRCLE
M
UST
B
E
W
HOLE
, and these slogans had stirred up the desired intrigue. But no one knew what it meant,
and the Wise Men weren’t telling.

Mae checked the time. She’d been watching the croquet match for ninety seconds. She
could only reasonably hold this pose for another minute or two. So what was her responsibility
to report this call? Had anyone actually heard what Kalden had said? What if they
had? What if this was some kind of test, to see if she’d report a rogue call? Maybe
this was part of Completion—a test like this to measure her loyalty, to thwart anyone
or anything that would impede Completion? Oh shit, she thought. She wanted to talk
to Annie, but she knew she couldn’t. She thought of her parents, who would give good
counsel, but their house was transparent, too, full of SeeChange cameras—a condition
of her father’s treatment. Maybe she could go there, meet
them
in the bathroom? No. She hadn’t, actually, been in touch with them for a few days.
They had warned her they were having some technical difficulties, would be back in
touch soon, that they loved her, and then hadn’t answered any of her messages for
the last forty-eight hours. And in that time, she hadn’t checked the cameras in their
house. She had to
do that. She made a mental note. Maybe she could call them? Make sure they were okay,
and then hint, somehow, that she wanted to talk to them about something very unsettling
and personal?

No, no. This was all mad. She’d gotten a random call from a man she now knew to be
nuts. Oh shit, she thought, hoping no one could guess at the chaos in her mind. She
relished being where she was, visible like this, a conduit like this, a guide to her
watchers, but this responsibility, this unnecessary intrigue, it crippled her. And
when she felt this paralysis, caught between entirely too many possibilities and unknowns,
there was only one place she felt right.

At 1:44 Mae entered the Renaissance, felt, above her, the greeting of the slowly turning
Calder, and took the elevator to the fourth floor. Just rising through the building
calmed her. Walking down the catwalk, the atrium visible below, brought her great
peace. This, Customer Experience, was home, where there were no unknowns.

At first, Mae had been surprised when they’d asked her to continue working, at least
a few hours a week, at CE. She’d enjoyed her time there, yes, but she assumed transparency
would mean she’d leave that far behind. “That’s exactly the point,” Bailey had explained.
“I think Number One, it’ll keep you connected with the ground-level work you did here.
Number Two, I think your followers and viewers will appreciate you continuing to do
this essential work. It’ll be a very moving act of humility, don’t you think?”

Mae was at once aware of the power she wielded—instantly, she became one of the three
most visible Circlers—and determined to
wear it lightly. So Mae had found time in each week to return to her old pod, and
to her old desk, which they’d left vacant. There had been changes made—there were
now nine screens, and the CEs were encouraged to be delving far deeper with their
clients, to reciprocate in far-reaching ways—but the work was essentially the same,
and Mae found that she appreciated the rhythm of it, the almost meditative quality
of doing something she knew in her bones, and she found herself being drawn to CE
at times of stress or calamity.

And so, in her third week of transparency, on a sunny Wednesday, she planned on putting
in ninety minutes at CE before the rest of the day overtook her. At three she had
to give a tour of the Napoleonic Era, where they were modeling the elimination of
physical money—the trackability of internet currency would eliminate huge swaths of
crime overnight—and at four, she was supposed to highlight the new musicians’ residences
on campus—twenty-two fully equipped apartments where musicians, especially those who
couldn’t count on making a living through sales of their music, could live for free
and play regularly for the Circlers. That would take her through the afternoon. At
five, she was supposed to attend an announcement from the latest politician to go
clear. Why they continued to make these proclamations with fanfare—they were now calling
them Clarifications—was a mystery to her and many of her watchers. There were tens
of thousands of clear elected officials all over the country and world, and the movement
was less a novelty and more of an inevitability; most observers predicted full governmental
transparency, at least in democracies—and with SeeChange there would soon be no other
kind—within eighteen months. After the Clarification, there
was an improv comedy battle on campus, a fundraiser for a school in rural Pakistan,
a wine tasting, and finally an all-campus barbecue, with music by a Peruvian trance
choir.

Mae walked into her old pod room, where her own words—S
ECRETS
A
RE
L
IES
; S
HARING
I
S
C
ARING
; P
RIVACY
I
S
T
HEFT
—had been cast in steel and dominated an entire wall. The place was bursting with
newbies, all of whom looked up, alarmed and happy to see her there among them. She
waved to them, gave them a theatrical faux-curtsey, saw Jared standing in the doorway
to his office, and waved at him, too. Then, determined to do her work without fanfare,
Mae sat down, logged on and opened the chute. She answered three queries in rapid
succession, with an average of 99. Her fourth client was the first to notice that
it was Mae, Transparent Mae, handling her query.

I’m watching you!
the client, a media buyer for a sporting-goods importer in New Jersey, wrote. Her
name was Janice, and she couldn’t get over the fact she could watch Mae typing the
answer to her query in real-time, on her screen, right next to where she was receiving
Mae’s typed answer.
Hall of mirrors!!
she wrote.

After Janice, Mae had a series of clients who did not know it was her answering their
queries, and Mae found that this bothered her. One of them, a T-shirt distributor
from Orlando named Nanci, asked her to join her professional network, and Mae readily
agreed. Jared had told her about a new level of reciprocation encouraged among the
CE staff. If you send a survey, be prepared to answer one yourself. And so after she
joined the Orlando T-shirt distributor’s professional network, she got another message
from Nanci. She asked Mae to respond to a short questionnaire about her preferences
in casual apparel, and
Mae agreed. She linked to the questionnaire, which she realized was not short; it
encompassed fully 120 questions. But Mae was happy to answer them, feeling her opinion
mattered and was being heard, and this kind of reciprocation would engender loyalty
from Nanci and all who Nanci came into contact with. After she answered the survey
questions, Nanci sent her a profuse thank-you, and told her she could choose the T-shirt
of her choice, and directed Mae to her consumer site. Mae said she would choose at
a later time, but Nanci wrote back, telling Mae that she could not wait to see which
shirt Mae would choose. Mae checked her clock; she’d been on the Orlando query for
eight minutes, far surpassing the new guideline per query, which was 2.5.

Mae knew she would have to power through the next ten or so queries to get back to
an acceptable average. She went to Nanci’s site, chose a shirt that featured a cartoon
dog in a superhero costume, and Nanci told her that it was a great choice. Mae then
took the next query, and was in the process of an easy boilerplate conversion, when
another message came from Nanci.
Sorry to be Ms. Sensitive, but after I invited you to choose my professional network,
you didn’t ask me to join
your
professional network, and though I know I’m just a nobody in Orlando, I felt like
I had to tell you that it made me feel devalued
. Mae told Nanci she had no intentions of making her feel devalued, that things were
just busy at the Circle, and that she had spaced on this essential reciprocation,
which she quickly remedied. Mae finished her next query, got a 98, and was following
up on that one, when she got another message from Nanci.
Did you see my message on the professional network?
Mae looked at all her feeds and saw no message from Nanci.
I posted it on the message board of
your
professional network!
she said. And so Mae went to
that page, which she didn’t visit often, and saw that Nanci had written,
Hello stranger!
Mae typed
Hello yourself! But you’re no stranger!!
and thought for a moment that that would mean the end of their exchange, but she
paused on the page, briefly, with a sense that Nanci was not quite finished. And she
wasn’t.
So glad you wrote back! Thought you might be offended that I called you ‘Stranger.’
Promise you weren’t peeved?
Mae promised Nanci that she was not peeved, answered with an XO, sent her ten subsequent
smiles, and went back to her queries, hoping that Nanci was satisfied and happy and
that they were cool. She took three more queries, she followed up with surveys, and
saw that her average was at 99. This provoked a flurry of congratulatory zings, watchers
happy to see Mae’s commitment, still, to the day-to-day tasks at the Circle and essential
to the operation of the world. So many of her watchers, they reminded her, were working
at desk jobs, too, and because she continued to do this work, voluntarily and with
evident joy, they saw her as a role model and inspiration. And this felt good. This
felt truly valuable to Mae. The customers made her better. And serving them while
transparent made her far better. She expected this. She was apprised by Stewart that
when thousands, or even millions, are watching, you perform your best self. You are
cheerier, more positive, more polite, more generous, more inquisitive. But he had
not told her of the smaller, improving alterations to her behavior.

The first time the camera redirected her actions was when she went to the kitchen
for something to eat. The image on her wrist showed the interior of the refrigerator
as she scanned for a snack. Normally, she would have grabbed a chilled brownie, but
seeing the image of her hand reaching for it, and seeing what everyone else would
be seeing, she pulled back. She closed the fridge, and from the
bowl on the counter, she selected a packet of almonds, and left the kitchen. Later
that day, a headache appeared—caused, she thought, by eating less chocolate than usual.
She reached into her bag, where she kept a few single-serving aspirin packets, but
again, on her screen, she saw what everyone was seeing. She saw a hand searching her
bag, clawing, and instantly she felt desperate and wretched, like some kind of pill-popping
addict.

She did without. Every day she’d done without things she didn’t want to want. Things
she didn’t need. She’d given up soda, energy drinks, processed foods. At Circle social
events, she nursed one drink only, and tried each time to leave it unfinished. Anything
immoderate would provoke a flurry of zings of concern, so she stayed within the bounds
of moderation. And she found it freeing. She was liberated from bad behavior. She
was liberated from doing things she didn’t want to be doing, eating and drinking things
that did her no good. Since she’d gone transparent, she’d become more noble. People
called her a role model. Mothers said their daughters looked up to her, and this gave
her more a feeling of responsibility, and that feeling of responsibility—to the Circlers,
to their clients and partners, to the youth who saw inspiration in her—kept her grounded
and fueled her days.

She was reminded of the Circle’s own survey questions, and she put on her survey headset
and got started. To her watchers she was expressing her opinions constantly, yes,
and felt far more influential than before, but something about the tidy rhythm and
call-and-response nature of the surveys felt missing. She took another customer query,
and then nodded. The distant bell rang. She nodded.

“Thank you. Are you happy with the state of airport security?”

“Smile,” Mae said.

“Thank you. Would you welcome change in airport security procedures?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

“Does the state of airport security dissuade you from flying more often?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

The questions continued, and she was able to get through ninety-four of them before
she allowed herself to lapse. Soon the voice arrived, unchanged.