The Circle

helicopters
     land, squinting high on the rooftops, looking for Annie’s yellow head, to no avail.
     And now she had to spend an hour at the Protagorean Pavilion, a task she knew was
     important and normally would find fascinating but today felt like an unbreachable
     wall between herself and her closest friend.
    On a granite panel outside the Protagorean Pavilion the building’s namesake was quoted
     loosely:
Humans are the measure of all things
. “More important for our purposes,” Mae said, opening the door, “is that now, with
     the tools available,
humans
can
measure
all things. Isn’t that right Terry?”
    In front of her stood a tall Korean-American man, Terry Min. “Hello Mae, hello Mae’s
     watchers and followers.”
    “You cut your hair some new way,” Mae said.
    With Annie coming back, Mae was feeling loopy, goofy, and Terry was temporarily derailed.
     He hadn’t counted on ad-libs. “Uh, yeah,” he said, running his fingers through it.
    “It’s angular,” Mae said.
    “Right. It is more angular. Should we go inside?”
    “We should.”
    The designers of the building had taken pains to use organic shapes, to soften the
     rigid math of the engineers’ daily work. The atrium was encased in silver and seemed
     to undulate, as if they stood at the bottom of an enormous corrugated tube.
    “What will we be seeing today, Terry?”
    “I thought we’d start with a tour, and then go a bit deeper with some stuff we’re
     doing for the educational sector.”
    Mae followed Terry through the building, which was more of an engineer’s lair than
     the parts of campus she’d become accustomed to visiting. The trick with her audience
     was to balance the mundane with the more glamorous parts of the Circle; both were
     necessary to reveal, and certainly thousands of viewers were more interested in the
     boiler-rooms than the penthouses, but the calibration had to be precise.
    They passed Josef and his teeth, and then said hello to various developers and engineers,
     each of whom turned to explain their work as best as they could. Mae checked the time
     and saw there was a new notice from Dr. Villalobos. She asked Mae to come visit as
     soon as she could.
Nothing urgent
, she said.
But it should be today
. As they made their way through the building, Mae typed back to the doctor, saying
     she’d see her in thirty minutes. “Should we see the education project now?”
    “I think that’s a great idea,” Terry said.
    They walked through a curving hallway and into a great open space, with at least a
     hundred Circlers working without division. It looked a bit like a midcentury stock
     market.
    “As your viewers might know,” Terry said, “the Department of Education has given us
     a nice grant—”
    “Wasn’t it three billion dollars?” Mae asked.
    “Well, who’s counting?” Terry said, abundantly satisfied with the number and what
     it demonstrated, which was that Washington knew the Circle could measure anything,
     including student achievement,better than they ever hope to. “But the point is that they asked us to design and
     implement a more effective wraparound data assessment system for the nation’s students.
     Oh wait, this is cool,” Terry said.
    They stopped in front of a woman and a small child. He looked about three, and was
     playing with a very shiny silver watch attached to his wrist.
    “Hi Marie,” Terry said to the woman. “This is Mae, as you probably know.”
    “I
do
know Mae,” Marie said in the slightest French accent, “and Michel here does, too.
     Say hello, Michel.”
    Michel chose to wave.
    “Say something to Michel, Mae,” Terry said.
    “How are you, Michel?” Mae said.
    “Okay, now show her,” Terry said, nudging Michel’s shoulder.
    On its tiny display, the watch on Michel’s wrist had registered the four words Mae
     had just said. Below these numbers was a counter, with the number 29,266 displayed.
    “Studies show that kids need to hear at least 30,000 words a day,” Marie explained.
     “So the watch does a very simple thing by recognizing, categorizing and, most crucially,
     counting those words. This is primarily for kids at home, and before school age. Once
     they’re there, we’re assuming all this is tracked in the classroom.”
    “That’s a good segue,” Terry said. They thanked Marie and Michel, and made their way
     down the hall to a large room decorated like a classroom but rebooted, with dozens
     of screens, ergonomic chairs,