The Circle

I took care of that.”
    “Have you told me what you do here yet?”
    “Ah, I don’t know. Have I? Look at that guy.”
    “What guy?”
    “Oh, never mind,” Kalden said, seeming to have already forgotten whom he was looking
     at. “So you’re in PR?”
    “No. Customer Experience.”
    Kalden tilted his head. “Oh. Oh. I knew that,” he said, unconvincingly. “You’ve been
     there a while?”
    Mae had to laugh. The man was not all there. His mind seemed barely tethered to his
     body, much less the earth.
    “I’m sorry,” he said, his face turning to her, now looking impossibly sincere and
     clear-eyed. “But I
want
to remember these things about you. I was actually hoping I’d see you here.”
    “How long have you worked here again?” she asked.
    “Me? Um.” He scratched the back of his head. “Wow. I don’t know. A while now.”
    “One month? A year? Six years?” she asked, thinking he really was some kind of savant.
    “Six?” he said, “That would be the beginning. You think I look old enough to have
     been here six years? I don’t want to look that old. Is it the grey hair?”
    Mae had no idea what to say. Of course it was the grey hair. “Should we get a refreshment?”
     she asked.
    “No, you go ahead,” he said.
    “Afraid to leave your hideout?”
    “No, just feeling less social.”
    She made her way to a table where a few hundred glasses of wine had been poured and
     were waiting.
    “Mae, right?”
    She turned to find the two women, Dayna and Hillary, who were building a submersible
     for Stenton. Mae remembered meeting them on her first day, and since then had been
     getting their updates on her second screen at least three a day. They were weeks away
     from finishing the craft; Stenton planned to take it to the Marianas Trench.
    “I’ve been following your progress,” Mae said. “Incredible. You’re building it here?”
    Mae glanced over her shoulder to make sure Kalden hadn’t made a quick exit.
    “With the Project 9 guys, yeah,” Hillary said, waving a hand at some other, unknown
     part of the campus. “Safer to build it here, to keep the patented stuff secure.”
    “This is the first vessel big enough to really bring back full-sized animal life,”
     Dayna said.
    “And you guys get to go?”
    Dayna and Hillary laughed. “No,” Hillary said. “This thing’s built for one man and
     one man only: Tom Stenton.”
    Dayna looked askance at Hillary, then back to Mae. “The costs of making it big enough
     for more people are pretty much prohibitive.”
    “Right,” Hillary said. “That’s what I meant.”
    When Mae returned to Kalden’s stairwell, holding two glasses of wine, he was in the
     same place, but he had somehow gotten himself two glasses of his own.
    “Someone came by with a tray,” he said, standing up.
    They stood briefly, each two-fisted, and Mae could think of nothing but clinking all
     four glasses together, which they did.
    “I ran into the team building the submersible,” Mae said. “You know them?”
    Kalden rolled his eyes. It was startling. Mae hadn’t seen anyone else do that at the
     Circle.
    “What?” Mae said.
    “Nothing,” he said. “Did you like the speech?” he asked.
    “The whole Santos thing? I did. Very exciting.” She was careful with her words. “I
     think this will be a momentous, uh, moment in the history of demo—” She paused, seeing
     him smile. “What?” she said.
    “Nothing,” he said. “You don’t have to give me a speech. I heard what Stenton said.
     You really think this is a good idea?”
    “You don’t?”
    He shrugged and drained half his glass. “That guy just concernsme sometimes.” Then, knowing he shouldn’t have said that about one of the Wise Men,
     he changed tacks. “He’s just so smart. It’s intimidating. You really think I look
     old? What would you say? Thirty?”
    “You don’t look that old,” Mae said.
    “I don’t believe you. I know I do.”
    Mae drank from one of her glasses. They looked around, watching the feed from Santos’s
     camera. It was being projected onto the far wall, and a group of Circlers stood, watching,
     while Santos mingled a few feet away. One Circler found his own image caught on the
     congresswoman’s camera, and positioned his hand to cover his second, projected, face.
    Kalden watched closely, his brow furrowed. “Hm,” he said. He tilted his head, like
     a traveler puzzling out some odd local customs. Then he turned to Mae, and looked