The Circle

when anything deviated from
     her normal buoyancy, people noticed.
    “Mae.”
    She wanted to hear it again, so she said nothing.
    “Mae.”
    It was a young woman’s voice, a young woman’s voice that sounded bright and fierce
     and capable of anything.
    “Mae.”
    It was a better, more indomitable version of herself.
    “Mae.”
    She felt stronger every time she heard it.
    She stayed at CE until five, when she showed her watchers the newest Clarification,
     the governor of Arizona, and enjoyed the surprise transparency of the governor’s entire
     staff—something that many officials were doing, to ensure to their constituents that
     deals were not being done, in darkness, outside the light of the clear leader. At
     the Clarifying event, Mae met up with Renata and Denise and Josiah—these Circlers
     who had once wielded some power over her and now were her acolytes—and afterward,
     they all had dinner in the Glass Eatery. There was little reason to leave campus for
     meals given that Bailey, hoping to engender more discussions and brain-sharing and
     socialization among Circlers, had instituted a new policy, whereby all food would
     be not only free, as it always had been, but prepared daily by a different notable
     chef. The chefs were happy for the exposure—thousands of Circlers smiling, zinging,
     posting photos—and the program was instantly and wildly popular and the cafeterias
     were overflowing with people and, presumably, ideas.
    Among the bustle that night, Mae ate, feeling unsteady, Kalden’swords and cryptic messages still rattling in her head. She was glad, then, for the
     distractions of the night. The improv comedy battle was appropriately terrible and
     funny despite its wall-to-wall incompetence, the Pakistan fundraiser was thoroughly
     inspiring—the event was able to amass 2.3 million smiles for the school—and finally
     there was the barbecue, where Mae allowed herself a second glass of wine before settling
     into her dorm.
    The room had been hers for six weeks now. It no longer made sense to drive back to
     her apartment, which was expensive and, last time she’d been there, after being gone
     for eight days, had mice. So she gave it up, and became one of the hundred Settlers,
     Circlers who had moved onto campus permanently. The advantages were obvious and the
     waiting list was now 1,209 names long. There was room on campus now for 288 Circlers,
     and the company had just bought a nearby building, a former factory, planning to convert
     it into 500 more rooms. Mae’s had been upgraded and now had fully smart appliances,
     wallscreens and shades, everything centrally monitored. The room was cleaned daily
     and the refrigerator stocked with both her standard items—tracked via Homie—and products
     in beta. She could have anything she wanted so long as she provided feedback to the
     manufacturers.
    She washed her face and brushed her teeth and settled into the cloud-white bed. Transparency
     was optional after ten p.m., and she usually went dark after her teeth-brushing, which
     she found people interested in generally, and, she believed, might promote good dental
     health among her younger watchers. At 10:11 p.m., she said good-night to her watchers—there
     were only 98,027 at that point, a few thousand of whom reciprocated her good-night
     wishes—lifted thelens over her head and placed it in its case. She was allowed to turn off the SeeChange
     cameras in the room, but she found she rarely did. She knew that the footage she might
     gather, herself, for instance about movements during sleep, could be valuable someday,
     so she left the cameras on. It had taken a few weeks to get used to sleeping with
     her wrist monitors—she’d scratched her face one night, and cracked her right screen
     another—but Circle engineers had improved the design, replacing the rigid screens
     with more flexible, unbreakable ones, and now she felt incomplete without them.
    She sat up in bed, knowing that it usually took her an hour or so to make her way
     to sleep. She turned on the wallscreen, planning to check on her parents. But their
     SeeChange cameras were all dark. She sent them a zing, expecting no answer and getting
     none. She sent a message to Annie but got no response. She paged through her Zing
     feed, reading a few funny ones, and, because she’d lost six pounds since going transparent,
     she spent twenty minutes looking for a new skirt and T-shirt, and somewhere in the