The Circle (42 page)
Authors: Dave Eggers
“I think you just mean to say,” Mae said, trying to hold her temper, “that it’ll just
take you a little while to answer all of the messages. But you’ll get to them all
eventually.”
Her father didn’t hesitate. “Well, I can’t say that, Mae. I don’t want to promise
that. It’s actually very stressful. And we’ve already had many people get angry when
they don’t hear back from us in a given amount of time. They send one message, then
they send ten more in the same day. ‘Did I say something wrong?’ ‘Sorry.’ ‘I was only
trying to help.’ ‘Up yours.’ They have these neurotic conversations with themselves.
So I don’t want to imply the kind of immediate message turnaround that most of your
friends seem to require.”
“Dad. Stop. You sound terrible.”
Her mother leaned forward. “Mae, your dad’s just trying to say that our lives are
already pretty fraught, and we have our hands full just working, paying bills and
taking care of the health stuff. If we have sixteen hours more work to do, then that
puts us in an untenable position. Can you see where we’re coming from? I say that,
again, with all due respect and gratitude to everyone who has wished us well.”
After dinner, her parents wanted to watch a movie, and they did so,
Basic Instinct
, at her father’s insistence. He’d seen it more than any other film, always citing
the nods to Hitchcock, the many witty homages—though he’d never made clear his love
of Hitchcock in the
first place. Mae had long suspected that the movie, with its constant and varied sexual
tensions, made him randy.
As her parents watched the film, Mae tried to make the time more interesting by sending
a series of zings about it, tracking and commenting on the number of moments offensive
to the LGBT community. She was getting a great response, but then saw the time, 9:30,
and figured she should get on the road and back to the Circle.
“Well, I’m gonna head out,” she said.
Mae thought she caught something in her father’s eye, some quick look to her mother
that might have said
at last
, but she could have been mistaken. She put on her coat and her mother met her at
the door, an envelope in her hand.
“Mercer asked us to give this to you.”
Mae took it, a simple business-sized envelope. It wasn’t even addressed to her. No
name, nothing.
She kissed her mother’s cheek, left the house, the air outside still warm. She pulled
out and drove toward the highway. But the letter was on her lap, and her curiosity
overtook her. She pulled over and opened it.
Dear Mae,
Yes, you can and should read this on camera. I expected that you would, so I’m writing
this letter not only to you, but to your “audience.” Hello, audience.
She could almost hear his introductory intake of breath, his settling in before an
important speech.
I can’t see you anymore, Mae. Not that we had such a constant or perfect friendship
anyway, but I can’t be your friend and also part of your experiment. I’ll be sad to
lose you, as you have been important in my life. But we’ve taken very different evolutionary
paths and very soon we’ll be too far apart to communicate.
If you saw your parents, and your mom gave you this note, then you saw the effect
all your stuff has had on them. I wrote this note after seeing them, both of them
strung out, exhausted by the deluge you unleashed on them. It’s too much, Mae. And
it’s not right. I helped them cover some of the cameras. I even bought the fabric.
I was happy to do it. They don’t want to be smiled upon, or frowned upon, or zinged.
They want to be alone. And not watched. Surveillance shouldn’t be the tradeoff for
any goddamn service we get.
If things continue this way, there will be two societies—or at least I hope there
will be two—the one you’re helping create, and an alternative to it. You and your
ilk will live, willingly, joyfully, under constant surveillance, watching each other
always, commenting on each other, voting and liking and disliking each other, smiling
and frowning, and otherwise doing nothing much else.
Already there were comments pouring through her wrist.
Mae, were you ever so young and dumb? How did you end up dating a zero like this?
That was the most popular, soon superseded by
Just looked up his picture. Does he have some Sasquatch somewhere in the family tree?
She continued reading the letter:
I will always wish all good things for you, Mae. I also hope, though I realize how
unlikely it is, that somewhere down the line, when the triumphalism of you and your
peers—the unrestrained Manifest Destiny of it all—goes too far and collapses into
itself, that you’ll regain your sense of perspective, and your humanity. Hell, what
am I saying? It’s already gone too far. What I should say is that I await the day
when some vocal minority finally rises up to
say
it’s gone too far, and that this tool, which is far more insidious than any human
invention that’s come before it, must be checked, regulated, turned back, and that,
most of all, we need options for opting out. We are living in a tyrannical state now,
where we are not allowed to—
Mae checked how many pages were left. Four more double-sided sheets, likely containing
more of the same directionless blather. She threw the pile on the passenger seat.
Poor Mercer. He’d always been a blowhard, and he never knew his audience. And though
she knew he was using her parents against her, something was bothering her. Were they
really that annoyed? She was only a block away, so she got out and walked back home.
If they were truly upset, well, she would and could address it.
When she walked in, she didn’t see them in the two most likely places, the living
room and the kitchen, and peeked around the corner into the dining room. They were
nowhere. The only sign of them at all was a pot of water boiling on the stove. She
tried not to panic, but that pot of boiling water, and the otherwise eerie quiet of
the house, arranged itself in a crooked way in her mind, and very suddenly she was
thinking of robberies, or suicide pacts, or kidnappings.
She ran up the stairs, taking them three at a time, and when she reached the top and
turned left quickly, into their bedroom, she saw them, their eyes turned to her, round
and terrified. Her father was sitting on the bed, and her mother was kneeling on the
floor, his penis in her hand. A small container of moisturizer rested against his
leg. In an instant they all knew the ramifications.
Mae turned away, directing the camera toward a dresser. No one said a word. Mae could
think only of retreating to the bathroom, where she pointed the camera at the wall
and turned off the audio. She rewound her spool to see what had been caught on camera.
She hoped the lens swinging from her neck had somehow missed the offending image.
But it had not. If anything, the angle of the camera revealed the act more clearly
than she’d witnessed it. She turned the playback off. She called AG.
“Is there anything we can do?” she asked.
Within minutes she was on the phone with Bailey himself. She was glad to get him,
because she knew that if anyone would agree with her on this, it would be Bailey,
a man of unerring moral compass. He didn’t want a sex act like that broadcast around
the world, did he? Well, that had already been done, but surely they could erase a
few seconds, so the image wouldn’t be searchable, wouldn’t be made permanent?
“Mae, c’mon,” he said. “You know we can’t do that. What would transparency be if we
could delete anything we felt was embarrassing in some way? You know we don’t delete.”
His voice was empathetic and fatherly, and Mae knew she would abide by whatever he
said. He knew best, could see miles further than Mae or anyone else, and this
was evident in his preternatural calm. “For this experiment, Mae, and the Circle as
a whole, to work, it has to be absolute. It has to be pure and complete. And I know
this episode will be painful for a few days, but trust me, very soon nothing like
this will be the least bit interesting to anyone. When everything is known, everything
acceptable will be accepted. So for the time being, we need to be strong. You need
to be a role model here. You need to stay the course.”
Mae drove back to the Circle, determined that when she got back to campus, she would
stay there. She’d had enough of the chaos of her family, of Mercer, her wretched hometown.
She hadn’t even asked her parents about the SeeChange cameras, had she? Home was madness.
On campus, all was familiar. On campus there was no friction. She didn’t need to explain
herself, or the future of the world, to the Circlers, who implicitly understood her
and the planet and the way it had to be and soon would be.
Increasingly, she found it difficult to be off-campus anyway. There were homeless
people, and there were the attendant and assaulting smells, and there were machines
that didn’t work, and floors and seats that had not been cleaned, and there was, everywhere,
the chaos of an orderless world. The Circle was helping to improve it, she knew, and
so many of these things were being addressed—homelessness could be helped or fixed,
she knew, once the gamificaton of shelter allotment and public housing in general
was complete; they were working on this in the Nara Period—but in the meantime, it
was increasingly troubling to be amid the madness outside the gates of the Circle.
Walking through San Francisco, or Oakland, or San Jose, or any city,
really, seemed more and more like a Third World experience, with unnecessary filth,
and unnecessary strife and unnecessary errors and inefficiencies—on any city block,
a thousand problems correctible through simple enough algorithms and the application
of available technology and willing members of the digital community. She left her
camera on.
She made the drive in less than two hours and it was only midnight when she arrived.
She was wired from the trip, from her nerves on constant alert, and needed relaxation,
and distraction. She went to CE, knowing there she could be useful and that there,
her efforts would be appreciated, immediately and demonstrably. She entered the building,
looking briefly up at the slow-turning Calder, and rose through the elevator, breezed
across the catwalk and to her old station.
At her desk, she saw a pair of messages from her parents. They were still awake, and
they were despondent. They were outraged. Mae tried to send them the positive zings
she’d seen, messages that celebrated that an older couple, dealing with MS no less,
could still be sexually active. But they weren’t interested.
Please stop
, they asked.
Please, no more
.
And they, like Mercer, insisted that she cease to contact them unless privately. She
tried to explain to them that they were on the wrong side of history. But they weren’t
listening. Mae knew that eventually she’d convince them, that it was only a matter
of time, for them and for everyone—even Mercer. He and her parents had been late to
get PCs, late to buy a cellphone, late to everything. It was comical and it was sad,
and it served no purpose, to put off the undeniable present, the unavoidable future.
So she would wait. In the meantime, she opened the chute. There were few people with
pressing needs at that hour, but there were always unanswered queries waiting for
business hours to start, so she figured she could chip away at the load before the
newbies came in. Maybe she’d finish them all, stun everyone, let them come in with
a clean slate, an empty chute.
There were 188 latent queries. She’d do what she could do. A customer in Twin Falls
wanted a rundown of all the other businesses visited by customers who had visited
his. Mae found the information easily and sent it to him, and instantly she felt calmer.
The next two were easy, boilerplate answers. She sent surveys and got 100s on both.
One of them sent her a survey in return; she answered it and was done in ninety seconds.
The next few queries were more complicated but she kept her rating at 100. The sixth
was more complicated still, but she answered it, got a 98, followed up and brought
it to a 100. The client, a heating/air-conditioning advertiser from Melbourne, Australia,
asked if he could add her to his professional network and she readily agreed. That’s
when he realized she was Mae.
THE Mae
? he typed. His name was Edward.
Can’t deny it
, she answered.
I’m honored
, Edward typed.
What time is it there? We’re just finishing our workday here
. She said it was late. He asked if he could add her to his mailing list, and again
she readily agreed. What followed was a quick deluge of news and information about
the insurance world of Melbourne. He offered to make her an honorary member of the
MHAPB, the Melbourne Heating and Air-Conditioning Providers Guild, formerly the Melbourne
Heating and Air-Conditioning Providers Brotherhood, and she said she would be flattered.
He added her
to the friends on his personal Circle profile, and asked that she reciprocate. She
did.
Gotta get back to work now
, she wrote,
say hello to all in Melbourne!
She felt, already, all of the madness of her parents, of Mercer, evaporating like
mist. She took the next query, which came from a pet grooming chain based in Atlanta.
She got a 99, followed up, got back a 100, and sent six other surveys, five of which
the client answered. She took another query, this one from Bangalore, and was in the
middle of amending the boilerplate to the query when another message came through
from Edward.
Did you see my daughter’s request?
he asked. Mae checked her screens, looking for some request from Edward’s daughter.
Eventually he clarified that his daughter had a different last name, and was in school
in New Mexico. She was raising awareness of the plight of bison in the state, and
was asking Mae to sign a petition and mention the campaign in whatever forums she
could. Mae said she would try, and quickly sent a zing about it.
Thank you!
Edward wrote, followed, a few minutes later, by a thank-you from his daughter, Helena.
I can’t believe Mae Holland signed my petition! Thanks!
she wrote. Mae answered three more queries, her rating dipping to 98, and though
she sent multiple follow-ups to these three, she got no satisfaction. She knew she’d
have to get twenty-two or so 100s to average the 98 up to 100 overall; she checked
the clock. It was 12:44. She had plenty of time. Another message came from Helena,
asking about jobs at the Circle. Mae offered her usual advice, and sent her the email
address of the HR department.
Can you put in a good word for me?
Helena asked. Mae said she would do as much as she could, given they had never met.
But you know me pretty well by now!
Helena said, and then directed her to her own profile page. She encouraged
Mae to read her essays about wildlife preservation, and the essay she used to get
into college, which she said was still relevant. Mae said she would try to read them
when she could. Wildlife and New Mexico brought Mercer to mind. That self-righteous
waste. Where was that man who made love to her on the edge of the Grand Canyon? They
had both been so comfortably lost then, when he picked her up from college and they
drove through the Southeast with no schedule, no itineary, never with any idea of
where they’d stay that night. They passed through New Mexico in a blizzard and then
to Arizona where they parked, and found a cliff overlooking the canyon, with no fences,
and there under a noonday sun he undressed her, a four-thousand-foot drop behind her.
He held her and she had no doubts because he was strong then. He was young then, he
had vision then. Now he was old and acted older. She looked up the profile page she’d
set up for him, and found it blank. She made an inquiry to tech and found he’d been
trying to take it down. She sent him a zing and got no answer. She looked up his business
page but it had been taken down, too; there was only a message saying he was now running
an analog-only business. Another message came through from Helena:
What did you think?
Mae told her she hadn’t had time to read anything yet, and the next message was from
Edward, Helena’s father:
It sure would mean a lot if you were to recommend Helena for a job there at the Circle.
No pressure but we’re counting on you!
Mae told them, again, that she’d do her best. A notice came through her second screen
about a Circle campaign to eradicate smallpox in West Africa. She signed her name,
sent a smile, pledged fifty dollars, and sent a zing about it. She saw immediately
that Helena and Edward rezinged the message.
We’re doing
our
part!
Edward wrote.
Quid pro quo?
It was 1:11 when the blackness swept
through her. Her mouth tasted acidic. She closed her eyes and saw the tear, now filled
with light. She opened her eyes again. She took a swallow of water but it only seemed
to heighten her panic. She checked her watchers; there were only 23,010, but she didn’t
want to show them her eyes, fearing they would betray her anxiety. She closed them
again, which she felt would seem natural enough for a minute, after so many hours
in front of the screen.
Just resting the eyes
, she typed and sent. But when she closed them again, she saw the tear, clearer now,
louder now. What was the sound she was hearing? It was a scream muffled by fathomless
waters, that high-pitched scream of a million drowned voices. She opened her eyes.
She called her parents. No answer. She wrote to them, nothing. She called Annie. No
answer. She wrote to her, nothing. She looked her up in the CircleSearch but she wasn’t
on campus. She went to Annie’s profile page, scrolled through a few hundred photos,
most of them from her Europe-China trip, and, feeling her eyes burn, she closed them
again. And again she saw the rip, the light trying to get through, the underwater
screams. She opened her eyes. Another message came through from Edward.
Mae? You out there? Sure would be nice to know if you can help out. Do write back
. Could Mercer really disappear like this? She was determined to find him. She searched
for him, for messages he might have sent to others. Nothing. She called him, but his
number had been disconnected. Such an aggressive move, to change your number and leave
no new one. What had she seen in him? His disgusting fat back, those terrible patches
of hair on his shoulders. Jesus, where was he? There was something very wrong when
you couldn’t find someone you were trying to find. It was 1:32.
Mae? Edward again. Can you reassure Helena that you’ll look at her site sometime soon?
She’s a bit upset now. Just any word
of encouragement would be helpful. I know you’re a good person and wouldn’t intentionally
mess with her head, you know, promising to help and then ignoring her. Cheers! Edward
. Mae went to Helena’s site, read one of the essays, congratulated her, told her it
was brilliant, and sent out a zing telling everyone that Helena from Melbourne/New
Mexico was a voice to be reckoned with, and that they should support her work in any
way they could. But the rip was still open inside Mae, and she needed to close it.
Not knowing what elese to do, she activated CircleSurveys, and nodded to begin.
