The Circle

band that wrote it. One of the friends on the thread
     said he knew the bassist in the band, and then looped him into the conversation. The
     bassist, Damien Ghilotti, was in New Zealand, was a studio engineer now, but was happy
     to know that “Puking Sally” was still resonating with the flu-ridden. His post thrilled
     all involved, and another 129 notices appeared, everyone thrilled to hear from the
     actual bassist from the band, and by the end of the thread, Damien Ghilotti was invited
     to play a wedding, if he wanted, or visit Boulder, or Bath, or Gainesville, or St.
     Charles, Illinois, any time he happened to be passing through, and he would have a
     place to stay and a home-cooked meal. Upon the mention of St. Charles, someone asked
     if anyone from there had heard about Tim Jenkins, who was fighting in Afghanistan;
     they’d seen some mentionof a kid from Illinois being shot to death by an Afghan insurgent posing as a police
     officer. Sixty messages later the respondents had determined that it was a different
     Tim Jenkins, this one from Rantoul, Illinois, not St. Charles. There was relief all
     around, but soon the thread had been overtaken by a multiparticipant debate about
     the efficacy of that war, U.S. foreign policy in general, whether or not we won in
     Vietnam or Grenada or even WWI, and the ability of the Afghans to self-govern, and
     the opium trade financing the insurgents, and the possibility of legalization of any
     and all illicit drugs in America and Europe. Someone mentioned the usefulness of marijuana
     in alleviating glaucoma, and someone else mentioned it was helpful for those with
     MS, too, and then there was a frenetic exchange between three family members of MS
     patients, and Mae, feeling some darkness opening its wings within her, signed off.
    Mae could no longer keep her eyes open. Though she’d only made it through three days
     of her social backlog, she shut down and made for the parking lot.

Tuesday morning’s chute was lighter than Monday’s, but the activity on her third screen
     kept her in her chair for the day’s first three hours. Before the third screen, there
     had always been a lull, maybe ten or twelve seconds, between when she’d answered a
     query and when she knew whether or not the answer had been satisfying; she’d used
     the time to memorize the boilerplates and do a few follow-ups, every so often to check
     her phone. But now that became more challenging. The third-screen feed dropped forty
     new InnerCircle messages every few minutes, fifteen or so OuterCircle posts and zings,
     and Mae usedevery available moment of downtime to quickly scroll through, make sure there was
     nothing that demanded her immediate attention, and then come back to her main screen.
    By the end of the morning, the flow was manageable, even exhilarating. The company
     had so much going on, so much humanity and good feeling, and was pioneering on all
     fronts, that she knew she was being improved just by being in the Circlers’ proximity.
     It was like a well-curated organic grocery store: you knew, by shopping there, that
     you were healthier; you couldn’t make a bad choice, because everything had been vetted
     already. Likewise, everyone at the Circle there had been chosen, and thus the gene
     pool was extraordinary, the brainpower phenomenal. It was a place where everyone endeavored,
     constantly and passionately, to improve themselves, each other, share their knowledge,
     disseminate it to the world.
    By lunchtime, though, she was wiped out, and very much looking forward to sitting,
     with her cerebral cortex removed, for an hour, on the lawn, with Annie, who had insisted
     on it.
    At 11:50, though, a second-screen message from Dan appeared:
You got a few mins?
    She told Annie she might be late, and when she arrived to Dan’s office, he was leaning
     against the doorjamb. He smiled sympathetically at Mae, but with a raised eyebrow,
     as if there was something about Mae that was perplexing him, something he couldn’t
     put his finger on. He extended his arm into the office, and she slipped past him.
     He closed the door.
    “Sit down, Mae. You know Alistair, I assume?”
    She hadn’t seen the man sitting in the corner, but now that she saw him, she knew
     she didn’t know him. He was tall, in his latetwenties, with a careful swirl of sandy brown hair. He was positioned diagonally against
     a rounded chair, his thin frame resting stiffly, like a two-by-four. He