The Circle

watching. I mean, we’re watching,
     too, and we’re getting better at watching all the time. But the beauty of having so
     many friends out there, as you do, is that one of them, five thousand miles away,
     has helped you avert a growing risk.”
    “So no more nitrates.”
    “Right. Let’s skip the nitrates. I’ve zinged you a list of foods that contain them,
     and your watchers can see, too. They should always be eaten in moderation, but should
     be avoided altogether if there’s any history of or risk of cancer. I hope you’ll be
     sure to convey this to your parents, in case they haven’t been checking their own
     Zing feed.”
    “Oh, I’m sure they have,” Mae said.
    “Okay, and this is the not-so-good news. It’s not about you or your health. It’s your
     parents. They’re fine, but I want to show you something.” The doctor brought up the
     SeeChange camera feeds in Mae’s parents’ house, set up a month into her father’s treatment.
     The medical team at the Circle was taking a strong interest in her father’s case,
     and wanted as much data as it could get. “You see anything wrong?”
    Mae scanned the screen. Where a grid of sixteen images should have been visible, twelve
     were blank. “There are only four working,” she said.
    “Correct,” said the doctor.
    Mae watched the four feeds for signs of her parents. She saw none. “Has tech been
     there to check?”
    “No need. We saw them do it. For each one, they reached up and put some kind of cover
     over them. Maybe just some sticker or fabric. Did you know about this?”
    “I didn’t. I’m so sorry. They shouldn’t have done this.”
    Instinctively, Mae checked her current viewership: 1,298,001. It always spiked during
     the visits to Dr. Villalobos. Now all these people knew. Mae felt her face flush.
    “Have you heard from your folks recently?” Dr. Villalobos asked. “Our records say
     you haven’t. But maybe—”
    “Not in the last few days,” Mae said. In fact, she hadn’t been in touch for over a
     week. She’d tried to call them, to no avail. She’d zinged and received no response.
    “Would you be willing to go visit?” the doctor asked. “As you know, good medical care
     is hard to provide when we’re in the dark.”
    Mae was driving home, having left work at five—something she hadn’t done in weeks—and
     was thinking of her parents, what kind of madness had overtaken them, and she was
     worried that somehow Mercer’s own madness had infected them. How dare they disconnect
     cameras! After all she’d done to help, after all the Circle had done to bend all rules
     to come to their aid! And what would Annie say?
    Damn her
, Mae thought as she made her way home, the air growing warmer as the distance grew
     between her and the Pacific. Mae had set up her lens on the car dash, inserting it
     into a special mount created for her time in the car.
That fucking debutante
. This was bad timing. Annie would likely find some way to turn all this to her advantage.
     Just when her envy of Mae—and it was that, it was so abundantly obvious—was growing,
     she could cut Mae down to size again. Mae and her nothing town, her parking-garage
     parents who couldn’t keep their screens operational, who couldn’t keep themselveshealthy. Who took a monumental gift, premium health care, for free, and abused it.
     Mae knew what Annie was thinking in her little entitled blond head:
You just can’t help some people
.
    Annie’s family line went back to the
Mayflower
, her ancestors having settled this country, and their ancestors having owned some
     vast swath of England. Their blood was blue all the way back, it seemed, to the invention
     of the wheel. In fact, if anyone’s bloodline
had
invented the wheel, it would have been Annie’s. It would make absolute and perfect
     sense and would surprise no one.
    Mae had discovered all this one Thanksgiving at Annie’s house, with twenty-odd relatives
     there, all with their thin noses, their pink skin, their weak eyes hidden behind forty
     lenses, when she became aware, during an appropriately self-effacing conversation—for
     Annie’s family was equally unwilling to talk too much or care too much about their
     lineage—that some distant relative of theirs had been at the very first Thanksgiving.
    “Oh god, who cares?” Annie’s mother had said, when Mae had pressed for more details.
     “Some random guy got on a boat. He probably owed money all over the Old