The Circle

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 withinthe 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, andsimple, 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