The Circle

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, therewas 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, andMae 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 tothat 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