The Circle

to be lost.”
    “Perfection,” Jackie said.
    “Well, I hope so,” Francis said, looking at his shoes, hiding in what Mae knew to
     be a fog of false modesty. “And as you all know,” he said, turning to Mae, speaking
     to her watchers, “we here at the Circle have been talking about Completion a lot,
     and though even us Circlers don’t know yet just what Completion means, I have a feeling
     it’s something like this. Connecting services and programs that are just inches apart.
     We track kids for safety, we track kids for educational data. Now we’re just connecting
     these two threads, and when we do, we can finally know the whole child. It’s simple,
     and, dare I say, it’s complete.”
    Mae was standing outside, in the center of the western part of campus, knowing she
     was stalling until Annie returned. It was 1:44, far later than she thought it would
     be before her arrival, and now she worried about missing her. Mae had an appointment
     with Dr. Villalobos at two o’clock, and that might take a while, given the doctor
     had warned her that there was something relatively serious—but not health-serious,
     she’d made clear—to talk about. But crowding out thoughts of Annie and the doctor
     was Francis, who was suddenly, bizarrely, attractive to her again.
    Mae knew the easy trick that had been played upon her. He was thin, and without any
     muscle tone, his eyes were weak, and he had a pronounced problem with premature ejaculation,
     yet simply because she’d seen the lust in Jackie’s eyes, Mae found herself wanting
     to be alone with him again. She wanted to bring him into her room that night. The
     thought was demented. She needed to clear her mind. It seemed like an appropriate
     time to explain and reveal the new sculpture.
    “Okay, we have to see this,” Mae said. “This was done by a renowned Chinese artist
     who’s been in frequent trouble with the authorities there.” At that moment, though,
     Mae couldn’t remember the artist’s name. “While we’re on the subject, I want to thank
     all the watchers who sent frowns to the government there, both for their persecution
     of this artist, and for their restrictions on internet freedoms. We’ve sent over 180
     million frowns from the U.S. alone, and you can bet that has an effect on the regime.”
    Mae still couldn’t retrieve the artist’s name and felt the omission was about to be
     noticed. Then it came through her wrist.
Say the man’s name!
And they provided it.
    She directed her lens toward the sculpture, and a few Circlers, standing between her
     and the piece, stepped out of the way. “No, no, it’s good,” Mae said. “You guys help
     show the scale of it. Stay there,” she said, and they stepped back toward the object,
     which dwarfed them.
    The sculpture was fourteen feet high, made of a thin and perfectly translucent form
     of plexiglass. Though most of the artist’s previous work had been conceptual, this
     was representational, unmistakable: a massive hand, as big as a car, was reaching
     out from, or through,a large rectangle, which most took to imply some sort of computer screen.
    The title of the piece was
Reaching Through for the Good of Humankind
, and had been noted, immediately upon its introduction, for its earnestness, anomalous
     to the artist’s typical work, which had a darkly sardonic tone, usually at the expense
     of rising China and its attendant sense of self-worth.
    “This sculpture is really hitting the Circlers at their core,” Mae said. “I’ve been
     hearing about people weeping before it. As you can see, people like to take photos.”
     Mae had seen Circlers posing before the giant hand, as if it were reaching for them,
     about to take them, elevate them. Mae decided to interview the two people who were
     standing near the sculpture’s outstretched fingers.
    “And you are?”
    “Gino. I work in the Machine Age.”
    “And what does this sculpture mean to you?”
    “Well, I’m not an art expert, but I think it’s pretty obvious. He’s trying to say
     that we need more ways to reach through the screen, right?”
    Mae was nodding, because this was the clear meaning for everyone on campus, but she
     felt it might as well be said, on camera, for anyone less adept at art interpretation.
     Efforts to contact the artist after its installation had been unsuccessful. Bailey,
     who had commissioned the work, said he had no hand—“you know me and puns,” he said—in
     its theme