The Circle

small, and it’s organic of course, so you drink it, you don’t notice, and it’s
     over.”
    “So the sensor is already in me?”
    “It is. And now,” the doctor said, tapping Mae’s wrist monitor, “now it’s active.
     It’ll collect data on your heart rate, blood pressure, cholesterol, heat flux, caloric
     intake, sleep duration, sleep quality, digestive efficiency, on and on. A nice thing
     for the Circlers, especially those like you who might have occasionally stressful
     jobs, is that it measures galvanic skin response, which allows you to know when you’re
     amped or anxious. When we see non-normative rates of stress in a Circler or a department,
     we can make adjustments to workload, for example. It measures the pH level of your
     sweat, so youcan tell when you need to hydrate with alkaline water. It detects your posture, so
     you know when you need to reposition yourself. Blood and tissue oxygen, your red blood
     cell count, and things like step count. As you know, doctors recommend about ten thousand
     steps a day, and this will show you how close you’re getting. Actually, let’s have
     you walk around the room.”
    Mae saw the number 10,000 on her wrist, and with each step she took, it dropped—9999,
     9998, 9997.
    “We’re asking all newbies to wear these second-gen models, and in a few months we’ll
     have all Circlers coordinated. The idea is that with complete information, we can
     give better care. Incomplete information creates gaps in our knowledge, and medically
     speaking, gaps in our knowledge create mistakes and omissions.”
    “I know,” Mae said. “That was the problem in college for me. You self-reported your
     health data, and so it was all over the place. Three kids died of meningitis before
     they realized how it was spreading.”
    Dr. Villalobos’s expression darkened. “You know, that kind of thing is just unnecessary
     now. First of all, you can’t expect college kids to self-report. It should all be
     done for them, so they can concentrate on their studies. STDs alone, Hep C—imagine
     if the data was just there. Then appropriate action could be taken. No guesswork.
     Have you heard of that experiment up in Iceland?”
    “I think so.” Mae said, but was only half-sure.
    “Well, because Iceland has this incredibly homogenous population, most of the residents
     have roots many centuries back on the island. Anyone can trace their ancestry very
     easily back a thousand years. So they started mapping the genomes of Icelanders, every
     single person, and were able to trace all kinds of diseases to theirorigins. They’ve gotten so much valuable data from that pool of people. There’s nothing
     like a fixed and relatively homogenous group, exposed to the same factors—and a group
     you can study over time. The fixed group, the complete information, both were key
     in maximizing the takeaway. So the hope is to do something like that here. If we can
     track all you newbies, and eventually all 10,000-plus Circlers, we can both see problems
     far before they become serious, and we can collect data about the population as a
     whole. Most of you newbies are around the same age, and in generally good health,
     even the engineers,” she said, smiling at what was evidently a joke she often told.
     “So when there are deviations, we’d like to know about them, and see if there are
     trends we can learn from. Does that make sense?”
    Mae was distracted by the bracelet.
    “Mae?”
    “Yes. That sounds great.”
    The bracelet was beautiful, a pulsing marquee of lights and charts and numbers. Mae’s
     pulse was represented by a delicately rendered rose, opening and closing. There was
     an EKG, shooting right like blue lightning and then starting over. Her temperature
     was rendered large, in green, 98.6, reminding her of that day’s aggregate, 97, which
     she needed to improve. “And what do these do?” she asked. There were a series of buttons
     and prompts, arranged in a row below the data.
    “Well, you can have the bracelet measure about a hundred other things. If you run,
     it’ll measure how far. It tracks your standing heart rate versus active. It’ll measure
     BMI, caloric intake.… See, you’re getting it.”
    Mae was busy experimenting. It was one of the more elegant objects she’d ever seen.
     There were dozens of layers to the information, every data point allowing her to ask
     more, to go deeper. When she tapped the digits of her current