The Circle

thank you,” he said, “I love you back. I love you as the grass loves the dew,
     as the birds love a bough.” He paused briefly, allowing Mae to catch her breath. She’d
     seen these talks online, but being here, in person, seeing Bailey’s mind at work,
     hearing his off-the-cuff eloquence—it was better than she thought possible. What would
     it be like, she thought, to be someone like that, eloquent and inspirational, so at
     ease in front of thousands?
    “Yes,” he continued, “it’s been a whole month since I’ve gotten up on this stage,
     and I know my replacements have been unsatisfying. I am sorry to deprive you of myself.
     I realize there is no substitute.” The joke brought laughter throughout the hall.
     “And I know a lot of you have been wondering just where the heck I’ve been.”
    A voice from the front of the room yelled “surfing!” and the room laughed.
    “Well, that’s right. I have been doing some surfing, and that’s part of what I’m here
     to talk about. I love to surf, and when I want to surf, I need to know how the waves
     are. Now, it used to be that you’d wake up and call the local surf shop and ask them
     about the breaks. And pretty soon they stopped answering their phones.”
    Knowing laughter came from the older contingent in the room.
    “When cellphones proliferated, you could call your buddies who might have gotten out
     to the beach before you. They, too, stopped answering their phones.”
    Another big laugh from the audience.
    “Seriously, though. It’s not practical to make twelve calls every morning, and can
     you trust someone else’s take on the conditions? The surfers don’t want any more bodies
     on the limited breaks we get up here. So then the internet happened, and here and
     there some geniuses set up cameras on the beaches. We could log on and get some pretty
     crude images of the waves at Stinson Beach. It was almost worse than calling the surf
     shop! The technology was pretty primitive. Streaming technology still is. Or was.
     Until now.”
    A screen descended behind him.
    “Okay. Here’s how it used to look.”
    The screen showed a standard browser display, and an unseen hand typed in the url
     for a website called SurfSight. A poorly designed site appeared, with a tiny image
     of a coastline streaming in the middle. It was pixilated and comically slow. The audience
     tittered.
    “Almost useless, right? Now, as we know, streaming video has gotten a lot better in
     recent years. But it’s still slower than real life, and the screen quality is pretty
     disappointing. So we’ve solved, I think, the quality issues in the last year. Let’s
     now refresh that page to show the site with our new video delivery.”
    Now the page was refreshed, and the coastline was full-screen, and the resolution
     was perfect. There were sounds of awe throughout the room.
    “Yes, this is live video of Stinson Beach. This is Stinson right at this moment. Looks
     pretty good, right? Maybe I should be out there, as opposed to standing here with
     you!”
    Annie leaned into Mae. “The next part’s incredible. Just wait.”
    “Now, many of you still aren’t so impressed. As we all know, many machines can deliver
     high-res streaming video, and many of your tablets and phones can already support
     them. But there are a couple new aspects to all this. The first part is how we’re
     getting this image. Would it surprise you to know that this isn’t coming from a big
     camera, but actually just one of these?”
    He was holding a small device in his hand, the shape and size of a lollipop.
    “This is a video camera, and this is the precise model that’s getting this incredible
     image quality. Image quality that holds up to this kind of magnification. So that’s
     the first great thing. We can now get high-def-quality resolution in a camera the
     size of a thumb. Well, a very big thumb. The second great thing is that, as you can
     see, this camera needs no wires. It’s transmitting this image via satellite.”
    A round of applause shook the room.
    “Wait. Did I say it runs on a lithium battery that lasts two years? No? Well it does.
     And we’re a year away from an entirely solar-powered model, too. And it’s waterproof,
     sand-proof, windproof, animal-proof, insect-proof, everything-proof.”
    More applause overtook the room.
    “Okay, so I set up that camera this morning. I taped it to a stake, stuck that stake
     in the sand, in the dunes, with no