The Circle

normally, but now they were bathed in color,
     as if a spotlight, with colored gels, was singling them out.
    “The three men you see in orange and red are repeat offenders. Orange indicates a
     low-level criminal—a guy convicted of petty thefts, drug possession, nonviolent and
     largely victimless crimes.” There were two men in the frame who had been colored orange.
     Walking closer to the camera, though, was an innocuous-enough seeming man of about
     fifty, glowing red from head to toe. “The man signaling red, though, has been convicted
     of violent crimes. This man has been found guilty of armed robbery, attempted rape,
     repeated assaults.”
    Mae turned to find Stenton’s face rapt, his mouth slightly open.
    Belinda continued. “We’re seeing what an officer would see if he were equipped with
     SeeYou. It’s a simple enough system that works through any retinal. He doesn’t have
     to do a thing. He scans any crowd, and he immediately sees all the people with prior
     convictions. Imagine if you’re a cop in New York. Suddenly a city of eight million
     becomes infinitely more manageable when you know where to focus your energies.”
    Stenton spoke. “How do they know? Some kind of chip?”
    “Maybe,” Belinda said. “It could be a chip, if we could get that to happen. Or else,
     even easier would be to attach a bracelet. They’ve been using ankle bracelets for
     decades now. So you modify it so the bracelet can be read by the retinals, and provides
     the tracking capability. Of course,” she said, looking to Mae with a warm smile, “you
     could also apply Francis’s technology, and make it a chip. But that would take some
     legal doing, I expect.”
    Stenton leaned back. “Maybe, maybe not.”
    “Well, obviously that would be ideal,” Belinda said. “And it would be permanent. You’d
     always know who the offenders were, whereas the bracelet is still subject to some
     tampering and removal. And then there are those who might say it should be removed
     after a certain period. The violators expunged.”
    “I hate that notion,” Stenton said. “It’s the community’s right to know who’s committed
     crimes. It just makes sense. This is how they’ve been handling sex offenders for decades.
     You commit sexual offenses, you become part of a registry. Your address becomes public,
     you have to walk the neighborhood, introduce yourself, all that, because people have
     a right to know who lives in their midst.”
    Belinda was nodding. “Right, right. Of course. And so, for lack of a better word,
     you tag the convicts, and from then on, if you’re a police officer, instead of driving
     down the street, shaking down anyone who happens to be black or brown or wearing baggy
     pants, imagine instead you were using a retinal app that saw career criminals in distinct
     colors—yellow for low-level offenders, orange for nonviolent but slightly more dangerous
     offenders, and red for the truly violent.”
    Now Stenton was leaning forward. “Take it a step further. Intelligence agencies can
     instantly create a web of all of a suspect’s contacts, co-conspirators. It takes seconds.
     I wonder if there could be variations on the color scheme, to take into account those
     who might be known
associates
of a criminal, even if they haven’t personally been arrested or convicted yet. As
     you know, a lot of mob bosses are never convicted of anything.”
    Belinda was nodding vigorously. “Yes. Absolutely,” she said. “And in those cases,
     you’d be using a mobile device to tag that person, given you wouldn’t have the benefit
     of a conviction to ensure the mandatory chip or bracelet.”
    “Right. Right,” Stenton said. “There are possibilities there, though. Good things
     to think about. I’m intrigued.”
    Belinda glowed, sat down, feigned nonchalance by smiling at Gareth, the next aspirant,
     who stood up, nervous and blinking. He was a tall man with cantaloupe-colored hair,
     and now that he had the room’s attention, he grinned shyly, crookedly.
    “Well, for better or worse, my idea was similar to Belinda’s. Once we realized we
     were working on similar notions, we collaborated a bit. The main commonality is that
     we’re both interested in safety. Myplan, I think, would eliminate crime block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood.”
    He stood before the screen, and revealed a rendering of a small neighborhood of four
     blocks, twenty-five houses. Bright green lines denoted the