The Circle

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 todo 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 towear 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