The Circle

change
     accordingly. That’s where the fun comes in. You post, you rise in therankings. A bunch of people like your post, and you really shoot up. It moves all
     day. Cool?”
    “Very,” Mae said.
    “We started you with a little boost—otherwise you’d be 10,411. And again, it’s just
     for fun. You’re not judged by your rank or anything. Some Circlers take it very seriously,
     of course, and we love it when people want to participate, but the rank is really
     just a fun way to see how your participation manifests itself vis-à-vis the overall
     Circle community. Okay?”
    “Okay.”
    “Okay then. You know how to get hold of me.”
    And with that, Gina turned and left.
    Mae opened the intra-company stream and began. She was determined to get through all
     the Inner and Outer feeds that night. There were company-wide notices about each day’s
     menus, each day’s weather, each day’s words of the wise—last week’s aphorisms were
     from MLK, Gandhi, Salk, Mother Teresa and Steve Jobs. There were notices about each
     day’s campus visits: a pet adoption agency, a state senator, a Congressman from Tennessee,
     the director of Médecins Sans Frontières. Mae found out, with a sting of remorse,
     that she’d missed, that very morning, a visit from Muhammad Yunus, winner of the Nobel
     Prize. She plowed through the messages, every one, looking for anything she would
     have reasonably been expected to answer personally. There were surveys, at least fifty
     of them, gauging the Circlers’ opinions on various company policies, on optimal dates
     for upcoming gatherings,interest groups, celebrations and holiday breaks. There were dozens of clubs soliciting
     members and notifying all of meetings: there were cat-owner groups—at least ten—a
     few rabbit groups, six reptile groups, four of them adamantly snake-exclusive. Most
     of all, there were groups for dog-owners. She counted twenty-two, but was sure that
     wasn’t all of them. One of the groups dedicated to the owners of very small dogs,
     Lucky Lapdogs, wanted to know how many people would join a weekend club for walks
     and hikes and support; Mae ignored this one. Then, realizing that ignoring it would
     only prompt a second, more urgent, message, she typed a message, explaining that she
     didn’t have a dog. She was asked to sign a petition for more vegan options at lunch;
     she did. There were nine messages from various work-groups within the company, asking
     her to join their subCircles for more specific updates and information sharing. For
     now she joined the ones dedicated to crochet, soccer, and Hitchcock.
    There seemed to be a hundred parents’ groups—first-time parents, divorced parents,
     parents of autistic children, parents of Guatemalan adoptees, Ethiopian adoptees,
     Russian adoptees. There were seven improv comedy groups, nine swim teams—there had
     been an inter-staff meet last Wednesday, hundreds of swimmers participating, and a
     hundred messages were about the contest, who won, some glitch with the results, and
     how a mediator would be on campus to settle any lingering questions or grievances.
     There were visits, ten a day at least, from companies presenting innovative new products
     to the Circle. New fuel-efficient cars. New fair-trade sneakers. New locally sourced
     tennis rackets. There were meetings of every conceivable department—R&D, search, social,
     outreach, professional networking, philanthropic, ad sales, and with a plummeting
     of herstomach, Mae saw that she’d missed a meeting, deemed “pretty much mandatory” for all
     newbies. That had been last Thursday. Why hadn’t anyone told her?
Well, stupid
, she answered herself.
They did tell you. Right here
.
    “Shit,” she said.
    By ten p.m., she’d made her way through all the intra-company messages and alerts,
     and now turned to her own OuterCircle account. She hadn’t visited in six days, and
     found 118 new notices from that day alone. She decided to plow through, newest to
     oldest. Most recently, one of her friends from college had posted a message about
     having the stomach flu, and a long thread followed, with friends making suggestions
     about remedies, some offering sympathy, some posting photos meant to cheer her up.
     Mae liked two of the photos, liked three of the comments, posted her own well wishes,
     and sent a link to a song, “Puking Sally,” that she’d found. That prompted a new thread,
     54 notices, about the song and the