The Circle

lunch?
was bookended by buttons on either side,
Yes
and
No
.
    Mae nodded. “Very impressive, guys!”
    “Thank you,” Sharma said. “Now, if you’ll indulge us. You have to answer, too.” And
     she invited Mae to touch either Yes or No on the screen.
    “Oh,” Mae said. She walked up to the screen and pushed Yes. The engineers cheered,
     the developers cheered. On the screen, a happy face appeared, with the words
You are heard!
arcing above. The questiondisappeared, replaced by the words
Demoxie result: 75% of respondents want more veggie options. More veggie options will
     be provided
.
    Sharma was beaming. “See? That’s a simulated result, of course. We don’t have everyone
     on Demoxie yet, but you get the gist. The question appears, everyone stops briefly
     what they’re doing, responds, and instantly, the Circle can take appropriate action
     knowing the full and complete will of the people. Incredible, right?”
    “It is,” Mae said.
    “Imagine this rolled out nationwide. Worldwide!”
    “It’s beyond my capability to imagine.”
    “But you came up with this!” Sharma said.
    Mae didn’t know what to say. Had she invented this? She wasn’t sure. She’d connected
     a few dots: the efficiency and utility of the CircleSurveys, the constant Circle goal
     of total saturation, the universal hope for real and unfiltered—and, most crucially,
     complete—democracy. Now it was in the hands of the developers, hundreds of them at
     the Circle, the best in the world. Mae told them this, that she was just one person
     who connected a few ideas that stood inches apart, and Sharma, and her team, beamed,
     and shook her hand, and they all agreed that what had already been done was setting
     the Circle, and possibly all of humanity, on a significant new path.
    Mae left the Renaissance and was greeted, just outside the door, by a group of young
     Circlers, all of whom wanted to tell her—all of them on their tiptoes, bursting—that
     they had never voted before, that they had been utterly uninterested in politics,
     had felt disconnected entirely from their government, feeling they had no real voice.
     They told her that by the time their vote, or their name on some petition, was filtered
     through their local government, and then theirstate officials, and finally their representatives in Washington, it felt like sending
     a message in a bottle across a vast and troubled sea. But now, the young Circlers
     said, they felt involved. If Demoxie worked, they said, then laughed—when Demoxie
     is implemented, of
course
it will work, they said—and when it does, you’ll finally have a fully engaged populace,
     and when you do, the country and the world will hear from the youth, and their inherent
     idealism and progressivism will upend the planet. This is what Mae heard all day,
     as she wandered through the campus. She could barely get from one building to another
     without being accosted.
We’re on the verge of actual change
, they said.
Change at the speed that our hearts demand
.

But throughout the morning, the calls from the blocked number continued. She knew
     it was Kalden, and she knew she wanted no part of him. Talking to him, much less seeing
     him, would be a significant step back now. By noon, Sharma and her team announced
     that they were ready for the first actual all-campus Demoxie tryout. At 12:45 everyone
     would receive five questions, and the results would not only be tabulated immediately,
     but, the Wise Men promised, the will of the people would be enacted within the day.
    Mae was standing in the center of the campus, amid a few hundred Circlers eating lunch,
     all of them buzzing about the imminent Demoxie demonstration, and she thought of that
     painting of the Constitutional Convention, all those men in powdered wigs and waistcoats,
     standing stiffly, all of them wealthy white men who were only passably interested
     in representing their fellow humans. They were purveyors of an innately flawed kind
     of democracy, where only thewealthy were elected, where their voices were heard loudest, where they passed their
     seats in Congress to whatever similarly entitled person they deemed appropriate. There
     had been some incremental improvements in the system since then, maybe, but Demoxie
     would explode it all. Demoxie was purer, was the only chance at direct democracy the
     world had ever known.
    It was twelve thirty, and because Mae was feeling strong, and feeling so confident,
     she