The Circle

out there who want
     to connect, to empathize and embrace, and disaster is imminent. Mae, this was clearly
     a deeply depressed and isolated young man who was not able to survive in a world like
     this, a world moving toward communion and unity. I wish I’d known him. I feel like
     I did, a little bit, having watched the events of that day. But still.”
    Bailey made a sound of deep frustration, a guttural sigh.
    “You know, a few years ago, I had the idea that I would endeavor, in my lifetime,
     to know every person on Earth. Every person, even if just a little bit. To shake their
     hand or say hello. And when I had this inspiration, I really thought I could do it.
     Can you feel the appeal of a notion like that?”
    “Absolutely,” Mae said.
    “But there are seven-odd billion people on the planet! So I did the calculations.
     The best I could come up with was this: if I spent three seconds with each person,
     that’s twenty people a minute. Twelve hundred an hour! Pretty good, right? But even
     at that pace, after a year, I would have known only 10,512,000 people. It would take
     me 665 years to meet everyone at that pace! Depressing, right?”
    “It is,” Mae said. She had done a similar calculation herself. Was it enough, she
     thought, to be
seen
by some fraction of those people? That counted for something.
    “So we have to content ourselves with the people we do know and can know,” Bailey
     said, sighing loudly again. “And content ourselves with knowing just how many people
     there are. There are so many, and we have many to choose from. In your troubled Mercer,
     we’ve lost one of the world’s many, many people, which reminds us of both life’s preciousness
     and its abundance. Am I right?”
    “You are.”
    Mae’s thoughts had followed the same path. After Mercer’s death, after Annie’s collapse,
     when Mae felt so alone, she felt the tear opening up in her again, larger and blacker
     than ever before. But then watchers from all over the world had reached out, sending
     her their support, their smiles—she’d gotten millions, tens of millions—she knew what
     the tear was and how to sew it closed. The tear was not knowing. Not knowing who would
     love her and for how long. The tear was the madness of not knowing—not knowing who
     Kalden was, not knowing Mercer’s mind, Annie’s mind, her plans. Mercer would have
     been saveable—would have been saved—if he’d made his mind known, if he’d let Mae,
     and the rest of the world, in. It was not knowing that was the seed of madness, loneliness,
     suspicion, fear. But there were ways to solve all this. Clarity had made her knowable
     to the world, and had made her better, had brought her close, she hoped, to perfection.
     Now the world would follow. Full transparency would bring full access, and there would
     be no more not-knowing. Mae smiled, thinking about how simple it all was, how pure.
     Bailey shared her smile.
    “Now,” he said, “speaking of people we care about and don’t want to lose, I know you
     visited Annie yesterday. How’s she doing? Her condition the same?”
    “It’s the same. You know Annie. She’s strong.”
    “She
is
strong. And she’s so important to us here. Just as you are. We’ll be with you, and
     with Annie, always. I know you both know that, but I want to say it again. You’ll
     never be without the Circle. Okay?”
    Mae was trying not to cry. “Okay.”
    “Okay then.” Bailey smiled. “Now we should go. Stenton awaits, and I think we could
     all,” and here he indicated Mae and her watchers, “use some distraction. You ready?”
    As they walked down the dark hallway toward the new aquarium, radiating a living blue,
     Mae could see the new caretaker climbing a ladder. Stenton had hired another marine
     biologist, after he’d had philosophical differences with Georgia. She’d objected to
     Stenton’s experimental feedings and had refused to do what her replacement, a tall
     man with a shaved head, was about to do, which was to combine all of Stenton’s Marianas
     creatures into one tank, to create something closer to the real environment in which
     he’d found them. It seemed like an idea so logical that Mae was glad that Georgia
     had been dismissed and replaced. Who wouldn’t want all the animals in their near-native
     habitat? Georgia had been timid and lacked vision, and such a person had little place
     near these tanks, near Stenton or in the Circle.
    “There he is,”