The Circle

than awesome.
     No, 368. She’d frowned at herself, assuming she’d be the only one.
    She felt numb. She felt naked. She walked through the health club, glancing at the
     bodies sweating, stepping on and off machines, and she wondered who among them had
     frowned at her. Three hundred and sixty-eight people loathed her. She was devastated.
     She left the health club and looked for a quiet place to collect her thoughts. She
     made her way to the rooftop near her old pod, where Dan had first told her of the
     Circle’s commitment to community. It was a half-milewalk from where she was, and she wasn’t sure she could make it. She was being stabbed.
     She had been stabbed. Who were these people? What had she done to them? They didn’t
     know her. Or did they? And what kind of community members would send a frown to someone
     like Mae, who was working tirelessly with them,
for
them, in full view?
    She was trying to hold it together. She smiled when she passed fellow Circlers. She
     accepted their congratulations and gratitude, each time wondering which of them was
     two-faced, which of them had pushed that frown button, each push of that button the
     pull of a trigger. That was it, she realized. She felt full of holes, as if every
     one of them had shot her, from behind, cowards filling her with holes. She could barely
     stand.
    And then, just before reaching her old building, she saw Annie. They hadn’t had a
     natural interaction in months, but immediately something in Annie’s face spoke of
     light and happiness. “Hey!” she said, catapulting herself forward to take Mae in a
     wraparound hug.
    Mae’s eyes were suddenly wet, and she wiped them, feeling silly and elated and confused.
     All her conflicted thoughts of Annie were, for a moment, washed away.
    “You’re doing well?” she asked.
    “I am. I am. So many good things happening,” Annie said. “Did you hear about the PastPerfect
     project?”
    Mae sensed something in Annie’s voice then, an indication that Annie was talking,
     primarily, to the audience around Mae’s neck. Mae went along.
    “Well, you told me the gist before. What’s new with PastPerfect, Annie?”
    While looking at Annie, and appearing interested in what Annie was saying, Mae’s mind
     was elsewhere: Had Annie frowned at her? Maybe just to knock her down a notch? And
     how would
Annie
fare in a Demoxie poll? Could she beat 97 percent? Could anyone?
    “Oh gosh, so many things, Mae. As you know, PastPerfect has been in the works for
     many years. It’s what you might call a passion project of Eamon Bailey. What if, he
     thought, we used the power of the web, and of the Circle and its billions of members,
     to try to fill in the gaps in personal history, and history generally?”
    Mae, seeing her friend trying so hard, could do nothing but try to match her glossy
     enthusiasm.
    “Whoa, that sounds incredible. Last we talked, they were looking for a pioneer to
     be the first to have their ancestry mapped. Did they find that person?”
    “Well, they did, Mae, I’m glad you asked. They found that person, and that person
     is me.”
    “Oh, right. So they really didn’t choose yet?”
    “No, really,” Annie said, her voice lowering, and suddenly sounding more like the
     actual Annie. Then she brightened again, rising an octave. “It’s me!”
    Mae had become practiced in waiting before speaking—transparency had taught her to
     measure every word—and now, instead of saying, “I expected it to be some newbie, someone
     without a whole lot of experience. Or at the very least a striver, someone trying
     to make some PartiRank leaps, or curry favor with the Wise Men. But you?” She realized
     that Annie was, or felt she was, in a position where she needed a boost, an edge.
     And thus she’d volunteered.
    “You volunteered?”
    “I did. I did,” Annie said, looking at Mae but utterly through her. “The more I heard
     about it, the more I wanted to be the first. As you know, but your watchers might
     not, my family came here on the
Mayflower
”—and here she rolled her eyes—“and though we have some high-water marks in our family
     history, there’s so much I don’t know.”
    Mae was speechless. Annie had gone haywire. “And everyone’s onboard with this? Your
     parents?”
    “They’re so excited. I guess they’ve always been proud of our heritage, and the ability
     to share it with people, and along the way find out a bit about the history of the