The Circle

widest. It saw everything that Mae saw, and often more. The
     quality of the raw video was such that viewers couldzoom, 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