The Circle

watched. The two go hand in hand.”
    “But who wants to be watched all the time?”
    “I do. I
want
to be seen. I want proof I existed.”
    “Mae.”
    “Most people do. Most people would trade everything they know, every
one
they know—they’d trade it all to know they’ve been seen, and acknowledged, that they
     might even be remembered. We all know we die. We all know the world is too big for
     us to be significant. So all we have is the hope of being seen, or heard, even for
     a moment.”
    “But Mae. We saw every creature in that tank, didn’t we? We saw them devoured by a
     beast that turned them to ash. Don’t you see that everything that goes into that tank,
     with that beast, with
this
beast, will meet the same fate?”
    “So what exactly do you want from me?”
    “When you have the maximum amount of viewers, I want you to read this statement.”
     He handed Mae a piece of paper, on which he’d written, in crude all capitals, a list
     of assertions under the headline “The Rights of Humans in a Digital Age.” Mae scanned
     it, catching passages: “We must all have the right to anonymity.” “Not every human
     activity can be measured.” “The ceaseless pursuit of data to quantify the value of
     any endeavor is catastrophic to true understanding.” “The barrier between public and
     private must remain unbreachable.” At the end she found one line, written in red ink:
     “We must all have the right to disappear.”
    “So you want me to read all this to the watchers?”
    “Yes,” Kalden said, his eyes wild.
    “And then what?”
    “I have a series of steps that we can take together that can begin to take all this
     apart. I know everything that’s ever happened here, Mae, and there’s plenty that’s
     gone on that would convince anyone, no matter how blind, that the Circle needs to
     be dismantled. I know I can do it. I’m the only one who can do it, but I need your
     help.”
    “And then what?”
    “Then you and I go somewhere. I have so many ideas. We’ll vanish. We can hike through
     Tibet. We can bike through the Mongolian steppe. We can sail around the world in a
     boat we built ourselves.”
    Mae pictured all this. She pictured the Circle being taken apart, sold off amid scandal,
     thirteen thousand people out of jobs, the campus overtaken, broken up, turned into
     a college or mall or something worse. And finally she pictured life on a boat with
     this man, sailing the world, untethered, but when she tried to, she saw, instead,
     the couple on the barge she’d met months ago on the bay. Out there, alone, living
     under a tarp, drinking wine from paper cups, naming seals, reminiscing about island
     fires.
    At that moment, Mae knew what she needed to do.
    “Kalden, are you sure we’re not being heard?”
    “Of course not.”
    “Okay, good. Good. I see everything clearly now.”

BOOK III

    T O HAVE GOTTEN so close to apocalypse—it rattled her still. Yes, Mae had averted it, she’d been
     braver than she thought possible, but her nerves, these many months later, were still
     frayed. What if Kalden hadn’t reached out to her when he did? What if he hadn’t trusted
     her? What if he’d taken matters into his own hands, or worse, entrusted his secret
     to someone else? Someone without her integrity? Without her strength, her resolve,
     her loyalty?
    In the quiet of the clinic, sitting next to Annie, Mae’s mind wandered. There was
     serenity here, with the rhythmic hush of the respirator, the occasional door opening
     or closing, the hum of the machines that kept Annie alive. She’d collapsed at her
     desk, was found on the floor, catatonic, and was rushed here, where the care surpassed
     what she could have received anywhere else. Since then, she’d stabilized, and the
     prognosis was strong. The cause of the coma was still a subject of some debate, Dr.
     Villalobos had said, but most likely, it was caused by stress, or shock, or simple
     exhaustion. The Circle doctors were confident Annie would emerge from it, as were
     a thousand doctors worldwide who had watched her vitals, encouraged by thefrequent flittering of her eyelashes, the occasional twitch of a finger. Next to her
     EKG, there was a screen with an ever-lengthening string of good wishes from fellow
     humans from all over the world, most or all of whom, Mae thought wistfully, Annie
     would never know.
    Mae looked at her friend, at her unchanging face, her glistening skin, the ribbed
     tube emerging