The Circle

You’re surrounded.” Then she thought of something that made her smile again. “You’re
     surrounded …” she said, lowering her voice, and then, in a chirpy alto, “by friends!”
     As she’dknown they would, a burst of laughter and cheers thundered through the auditorium.
    But still he didn’t stop. He hadn’t looked at the drone in minutes. Mae checked the
     clock: 19 minutes, 57 seconds. She couldn’t decide whether or not it mattered if he
     stopped, or acknowledged the cameras. He’d been found, after all, hadn’t he? They’d
     probably beaten the Fiona Highbridge record when they’d caught him running to his
     car. That was the moment they’d verified his corporeal identity. Mae had the brief
     thought that they should call off the drones, and shut down the cameras, because Mercer
     was in one of his moods, and wouldn’t be cooperating—and anyway, she’d proven what
     she intended to prove.
    But something about his inability to give in, to admit defeat, or to at least acknowledge
     the incredible power of the technology at Mae’s command … she knew she couldn’t give
     up until she had received some sense of his acquiescence. What would that be, though?
     She didn’t know, but she knew she’d know it when she saw it.
    And then the landscape passing beside the car opened up. It was no longer woods, dense
     and moving quickly. Now there was all blue, and treetops, and bright white clouds.
    She looked to another camera-view, and saw the view from an overhead drone. Mercer
     was driving on a bridge, a narrow bridge connecting the mountain to another, the span
     rising hundreds of feet over a gorge.
    “Can we turn the microphone up at all?” she asked.
    An icon appeared, indicating that the volume had been at half-power, and was now at
     full.
    “Mercer!” she said, using a voice as ominous as she could muster.His head jerked toward the drone, shocked by the volume. Maybe he hadn’t heard her
     before?
    “Mercer! It’s me, Mae!” she said, now holding out hope that he hadn’t known, until
     then, that it was her that was behind all this. But he didn’t smile. He only shook
     his head, slowly, as if in disappointment most profound.
    Now she could see another two drones on the passenger-side window. A new voice, male,
     boomed from one of them: “Mercer, you motherfucker! Stop driving, you fucking asshole!”
    Mercer’s head swung to this voice, and when he turned back to the road, his face showed
     real panic.
    On the screen behind her, Mae saw that two SeeChange cameras, positioned on the bridge,
     had been added to the grid. A third came alive seconds later, offering a view of the
     span from the riverbank far below.
    Now another voice, this one a woman’s and laughing, boomed from the third drone: “Mercer,
     submit to us! Submit to our will! Be our friend!”
    Mercer turned his truck toward the drone, as if intending to ram it, but it adjusted
     its trajectory automatically and mimicked his movement, staying directly in sync.
     “You can’t escape, Mercer!” the woman’s voice bellowed. “Never, ever, ever. It’s over.
     Now give up. Be our friend!” This last entreaty was rendered in a child’s whine, and
     the woman transmitting through the electronic speaker laughed at its strangeness,
     this nasal entreaty emanating from a dull black drone.
    The audience was cheering, and the comments were piling up, a number of watchers saying
     this was the greatest viewing experience of their lives.
    And while the cheers were growing louder, Mae saw something come over Mercer’s face,
     something like determination, something like serenity. His right arm spun the steering
     wheel, and he disappeared from the view of drones, temporarily at least, and when
     they regained their lock on him, his truck was crossing the highway, speeding toward
     its concrete barrier, so fast that it was impossible that it could hold him back.
     The truck broke through and leapt into the gorge, and, for a brief moment, seemed
     to fly, the mountains visible for miles beyond. And then the truck dropped from view.
    Mae’s eyes turned, instinctively, to the camera on the riverbed, and she saw, clearly,
     a tiny object dropping from the bridge overhead and landing, like a tin toy, on the
     rocks below. Though she knew this object was Mercer’s truck, and she knew, in some
     recess of her mind, that there could be no survivors of such a fall, she looked back
     to the other cameras, to the views