The Circle

then you can imagine
     they’d have a good chance at one of those spots.”
    “And it’ll be updated how often?”
    “Oh, daily. Once we get full participation from all schools and districts, we’ll be
     able to keep daily rankings, with every test, every pop quiz incorporated instantly.
     And of course these can be broken up between public and private, regional, and the
     rankings can be merged, weighted, and analyzed to see trends among various other factors—socioeconomic,
     race, ethnicity, everything.”
    AG dinged in Mae’s ear. “Ask about how it intersects with TruYouth.”
    “Jackie, I understand this overlaps in an interesting way with TruYouth, formerly
     known as ChildTrack.” Mae got the sentence out just before a wave of nausea and sweat
     overtook her. She didn’t want to see Francis. Maybe it wouldn’t be Francis? There
     were other Circlers on the project. She checked her wrist, thinking she might be able
     to quickly find him with CircleSearch. But then there he was, striding toward her.
    “Here’s Francis Garaventa,” Jackie said, oblivious to Mae’s distress, “who can talk
     about the intersection between YouthRank and TruYouth, which I must say is at once
     revolutionary and necessary.”
    As Francis walked toward them, his hands coyly behind his back, Mae and Jackie both
     watched him, Mae feeling sweat pool in her armpits and also sensing that Jackie had
     a more than professional feeling for him. This was a different Francis. He was still
     shy, still slight, but his smile was confident, as if he’d been recently praised and
     expected more.
    “Hi Francis,” Jackie said, shaking his hand with her unbroken one, and turning her
     shoulder flirtatiously. It was not apparent to the camera, or to Francis, but to Mae
     it was as subtle as a gong.
    “Hello Jackie, hello Mae,” he said, “can I bring you into my lair?” He smiled, and
     without waiting for a response, turned and led them into the next room. Mae hadn’t
     seen his office, and felt conflicted about sharing it with her watchers. It was a
     dark room with dozens of screens arranged on the wall into a seamless grid.
    “So as your watchers might know, we’ve been pioneering a program to make kids safer.
     In the states where we’ve been testing theprogram, there’s been an almost 90 percent drop in all crime, and a 100 percent drop
     in child abductions. Nationwide, we’ve had only three abductions, total, and all were
     rectified within minutes, given our ability to track the location of the participating
     children.”
    “It’s been just
incredible
,” Jackie said, shaking her head, her voice low and soaked in something like lust.
    Francis smiled at her, oblivious or pretending to be. Mae’s wrist was alive with thousands
     of smiles and hundreds of comments. Parents in states without YouthTrack were considering
     moving. Francis was being compared to Moses.
    “And meanwhile,” Jackie said, “the crew here at the Protagorean Pavilion has been
     working to coordinate all student measurements—to make sure that all homework, reading,
     attendance and test scores are all kept in one unified database. They’re almost there.
     We’re inches away from the moment when, by the time a student is ready for college,
     we have complete knowledge of everything that student has learned. Every word they
     read, every word they looked up, every sentence they highlighted, every equation they
     wrote, every answer and correction. The guesswork of knowing where all students stand
     and what they know will be over.”
    Mae’s wrist was still scrolling madly.
Where was this 20 yrs ago?
a watcher wrote.
My kids would have gone to Yale
.
    Now Francis stepped in. The idea that he and Jackie had been rehearsing this made
     Mae ill. “Now the exciting, and blazingly simple part,” he said, smiling at Jackie
     with professional respect, “is that we can store all this information in the nearly
     microscopic chip, which is now used purely for safety reasons. But what if it provides
     both locational tracking and educational tracking? What if it’s all in one place?”
    “It’s a no-brainer,” Jackie said.
    “Well, I hope parents will see it that way. For participating families, they’ll have
     constant and real-time access to everything—location, scores, attendance, everything.
     And it won’t be in some handheld device, which the kid might lose. It’ll be in the
     cloud, and in the child him- or herself, never