The Circle

something was bothering her. Were they
     really that annoyed? She was only a block away, so she got out and walked back home.
     If they were truly upset, well, she would and could address it.
    When she walked in, she didn’t see them in the two most likely places, the living
     room and the kitchen, and peeked around the corner into the dining room. They were
     nowhere. The only sign of them at all was a pot of water boiling on the stove. She
     tried not to panic, but that pot of boiling water, and the otherwise eerie quiet of
     the house, arranged itself in a crooked way in her mind, and very suddenly she was
     thinking of robberies, or suicide pacts, or kidnappings.
    She ran up the stairs, taking them three at a time, and when she reached the top and
     turned left quickly, into their bedroom, she saw them, their eyes turned to her, round
     and terrified. Her father was sitting on the bed, and her mother was kneeling on the
     floor, his penis in her hand. A small container of moisturizer rested against his
     leg. In an instant they all knew the ramifications.
    Mae turned away, directing the camera toward a dresser. No one said a word. Mae could
     think only of retreating to the bathroom, where she pointed the camera at the wall
     and turned off the audio. She rewound her spool to see what had been caught on camera.
     She hoped the lens swinging from her neck had somehow missed the offending image.
    But it had not. If anything, the angle of the camera revealed the act more clearly
     than she’d witnessed it. She turned the playback off. She called AG.
    “Is there anything we can do?” she asked.
    Within minutes she was on the phone with Bailey himself. She was glad to get him,
     because she knew that if anyone would agree with her on this, it would be Bailey,
     a man of unerring moral compass. He didn’t want a sex act like that broadcast around
     the world, did he? Well, that had already been done, but surely they could erase a
     few seconds, so the image wouldn’t be searchable, wouldn’t be made permanent?
    “Mae, c’mon,” he said. “You know we can’t do that. What would transparency be if we
     could delete anything we felt was embarrassing in some way? You know we don’t delete.”
     His voice was empathetic and fatherly, and Mae knew she would abide by whatever he
     said. He knew best, could see miles further than Mae or anyone else, and thiswas evident in his preternatural calm. “For this experiment, Mae, and the Circle as
     a whole, to work, it has to be absolute. It has to be pure and complete. And I know
     this episode will be painful for a few days, but trust me, very soon nothing like
     this will be the least bit interesting to anyone. When everything is known, everything
     acceptable will be accepted. So for the time being, we need to be strong. You need
     to be a role model here. You need to stay the course.”
    Mae drove back to the Circle, determined that when she got back to campus, she would
     stay there. She’d had enough of the chaos of her family, of Mercer, her wretched hometown.
     She hadn’t even asked her parents about the SeeChange cameras, had she? Home was madness.
     On campus, all was familiar. On campus there was no friction. She didn’t need to explain
     herself, or the future of the world, to the Circlers, who implicitly understood her
     and the planet and the way it had to be and soon would be.
    Increasingly, she found it difficult to be off-campus anyway. There were homeless
     people, and there were the attendant and assaulting smells, and there were machines
     that didn’t work, and floors and seats that had not been cleaned, and there was, everywhere,
     the chaos of an orderless world. The Circle was helping to improve it, she knew, and
     so many of these things were being addressed—homelessness could be helped or fixed,
     she knew, once the gamificaton of shelter allotment and public housing in general
     was complete; they were working on this in the Nara Period—but in the meantime, it
     was increasingly troubling to be amid the madness outside the gates of the Circle.
     Walking through San Francisco, or Oakland, or San Jose, or any city,really, seemed more and more like a Third World experience, with unnecessary filth,
     and unnecessary strife and unnecessary errors and inefficiencies—on any city block,
     a thousand problems correctible through simple enough algorithms and the application
     of available technology and willing members of the digital