The Circle

what to say. But so the project is going
     well? How close are you to—”
    “You’re still so off-balance! I like that,” Francis said.
    “You like a woman who’s off-balance.”
    “Especially in my presence. I want you on your toes, off-balance, intimidated, handcuffed,
     and willing to prostrate yourself at my command.”
    Mae wanted to laugh, but found she couldn’t.
    Francis was staring at his plate. “Shit. Every time my brain parks the car neatly
     in the driveway, my mouth drives through the back of the garage. I’m sorry. I swear
     I’m working on this.”
    “It’s fine. Tell me about …”
    “ChildTrack.” He looked up. “You really want to know?”
    “I do.”
    “Because once you get me started, it’ll make your Monday deluge look like a tinkle.”
    “We have five and a half minutes left.”
    “Okay, remember when they tried to do the implants in Denmark?”
    Mae shook her head. She had some vague recollection of a terrible child abduction
     and murder—
    Francis checked his watch, as if knowing that explaining Denmark would steal a minute
     from him. He sighed and started in: “So a couple years ago, the government of Denmark
     tried a program where they inserted chips in kids’ wrists. It’s easy, takes two seconds,
     it’s medically sound, and instantly it works. Every parent knows where their kid is
     at all times. They limited it to under-fourteens, and at first, everyone’s fine. The
     court challenges are dropped because thereare so few objections, the polling is through the roof. The parents love it. I mean,
love
it. These are kids, and we’d do anything to keep them safe, right?”
    Mae nodded, but suddenly remembered that this story ended horribly.
    “But then seven kids go missing one day. The cops, the parents, think, Hey, no problem.
     We know where the kids are. They follow the chips, but when they get to the chips,
     all seven tracking to some parking lot, they find them all in a paper bag, all bloody.
     Just the chips.”
    “Now I remember.” Mae felt sick.
    “They find the bodies a week later, and by then the public is in a panic. Everyone’s
     irrational. They think the chips
caused
the kidnapping, the murders, that somehow the chips provoked whoever did this, made
     the task more tempting.”
    “That was so horrible. That was the end of the chips.”
    “Yeah, but the reasoning was illogical. Especially here. We have, what, twelve thousand
     abductions a year? How many murders? The problem there was how shallow the chips were
     placed. Anyone can just cut it out of someone’s wrist if they wanted to. Too easy.
     But the tests we’re doing here—did you meet Sabine?”
    “I did.”
    “Well, she’s on the team. She won’t tell you that, because she’s doing some related
     stuff she can’t talk about. But for this, she figured out a way to put a chip in the
     bone. And that makes all the difference.”
    “Oh shit. What bone?”
    “Doesn’t matter, I don’t think. You’re making a face.”
    Mae corrected her face, tried to look neutral.
    “Sure, it’s insane. I mean, some people freak out about chips in our heads, our bodies,
     but this thing is about as technologically advanced as a walkie-talkie. It doesn’t
     do anything but tell you where something is. And they’re everywhere already. Every
     other product you buy has one of these chips. You buy a stereo, it has a chip. You
     buy a car, it’s got a bunch of chips. Some companies put chips in food packaging,
     to make sure it’s fresh when it gets to market. It’s just a simple tracker. And if
     you embed it in bone, it stays there, and can’t be seen with the naked eye—not like
     the wrist ones.”
    Mae put down her burrito. “Really in the bone?”
    “Mae, think about a world where there could never again be a significant crime against
     a child. None possible. The second a kid’s not where he’s supposed to be, a massive
     alert goes off, and the kid can be tracked down immediately.
Everyone
can track her. All authorities know instantly she’s missing, but they know exactly
     where she is. They can call the mom and say ‘Hey, she just went to the mall,’ or they
     can track down some molester in seconds. The only hope an abductor would have is to
     take a kid, run into the woods with her, do something and run off before the world
     descends upon him. But he would have about a minute and a half to do it.”
    “Or if they could jam the transmission from the