The Circle

at her two glasses and at his own, as if just now realizing the humor in both of them
     standing two-fisted in a doorway. “I’m gonna get rid of this one,” he said, and downed
     the glass in his left hand. Mae followed suit.
    “Sorry,” she said, for no reason. She knew she would soon be tipsy, probably too tipsy
     to hide it; bad decisions would ensue. She tried to think of something intelligent
     to say while she could.
    “So where does all that go?” she asked.
    “The stuff from the camera?”
    “Yeah, is it stored somewhere here? The cloud?”
    “Well, it’s in the cloud, sure, but it has to be stored in a physical place, too.
     The stuff from Stewart’s camera … Wait. You want to see something?”
    He was already halfway down the stairwell, his limbs nimble and spidery.
    “I don’t know,” Mae said.
    Kalden looked up, as if he’d had his feelings hurt. “I can show you where Stewart
     is stored. You want to? I’m not taking you to some dungeon.”
    Mae looked around the room, scanning for Dan and Jared, but couldn’t find them. She’d
     stayed an hour, and they’d seen her, so she assumed she could leave. She took a few
     pictures, posted them, and sent a series of zings, detailing and commenting on the
     proceedings. Then she followed Kalden down the stairs, three flights, to what she
     assumed was the basement. “I’m really trusting you,” she said.
    “You should,” Kalden said, approaching a large blue door. He passed his fingers over
     a wall-mounted pad and it opened. “Come.”
    She followed him down a long hallway, and she had the feeling she was passing from
     one building to another, through some tunnel far underground. Soon another door appeared,
     and again Kalden released the lock with his fingerprints. Mae followed, almost giddy,
     intrigued by his extraordinary access, too tipsy to measure the wisdom of following
     this calligraphic man through this labyrinth. They rode down what Mae guessed was
     four floors, exited into another long corridor, and then entered another stairwell,
     where they again went down. Mae soon found her second glass of wine cumbersome, so
     she finished it.
    “Anywhere I can put this?” she asked. Without a word, Kalden took the glass and left
     it on the lowest step of the stairway they’d just finished.
    Who was this person? He had access to every door he encountered, but he also had an
     anarchic streak. No one else at the Circle would abandon a glass like that—which amounted
     to some grand act of pollution—and no one else would take such a journey in the middleof a company party. There was a muffled part of Mae that knew Kalden was likely a
     troublemaker here, and that what they were doing was probably against some or all
     rules and regulations.
    “I still don’t know what you do here,” she said.
    They were walking through a dimly lit corridor that sloped gently downward and with
     no apparent end.
    He turned. “Not much. I go to meetings. I listen, I provide feedback. It’s not very
     important,” he said, walking briskly ahead of her.
    “Do you know Annie Allerton?”
    “Of course. I love Annie.” Now he turned back to her. “Hey, you still have that lemon
     I gave you?”
    “No. It never turned yellow.”
    “Huh,” he said, and his eyes briefly left their focus on her, as if they were needed
     somewhere else, somewhere deep in his mind, for a brief but crucial calculation.
    “Where are we?” Mae asked. “I feel like we’re a thousand feet underground.”
    “Not quite,” he said, his eyes returning. “But close. Have you heard of Project 9?”
    Project 9, as far as Mae knew, was the all-encompassing name for the secret research
     being done at the Circle. Anything from space technology—Stenton thought the Circle
     could design and build a far better reusable spacecraft—to what was rumored to be
     a plan to embed and make accessible massive amounts of data in human DNA.
    “Is that where we’re going?” Mae asked.
    “No,” he said, and opened another door.
    They entered a large room, about the size of a basketball court, dimly lit but for
     a dozen spotlights trained on an enormous red metallicbox, the size of a bus. Each side was smooth, polished, the whole thing surrounded
     by a network of gleaming silver pipes forming an elaborate grid around it.
    “It looks like some kind of Donald Judd sculpture,” Mae said.
    Kalden turned to her, his face alight. “I’m so glad you said that. He was a