The Circle

in their best-known clothes, wearing expressions that spoke, cartoonishly,
     of their personalities. Ty Gospodinov, the Circle’s boy-wonder visionary, was wearing
     nondescript glasses and an enormous hoodie, staring leftward and smiling; he seemed
     to be enjoying some moment, alone, tuned into some distant frequency. People said
     he was borderline Asperger’s, and the picture seemed intent on underscoring the point.
     With his dark unkempt hair, his unlined face, he looked no more than twenty-five.
    “Ty looks checked out, right?” Annie said. “But he couldn’t be. None of us would be
     here if he wasn’t a fucking brilliant management master, too. I should explain the
     dynamic. You’ll be moving up quickly so I’ll lay it out.”
    Ty, born Tyler Alexander Gospodinov, was the first Wise Man, Annie explained, and
     everyone always just called him Ty.
    “I know this,” Mae said.
    “Don’t stop me now. I’m giving you the same spiel I have to give to heads of state.”
    “Okay.”
    Annie continued.
    Ty realized he was, at best, socially awkward, and at worst an utter interpersonal
     disaster. So, just six months before the company’s IPO, he made a very wise and profitable
     decision: he hired the other two Wise Men, Eamon Bailey and Tom Stenton. The move
     assuaged the fears of all investors and ultimately tripled the company’s valuation.
     The IPO raised $3 billion, unprecedented but not unexpected, and with all monetary
     concerns behind him, and with Stenton and Bailey aboard, Ty was free to float, to
     hide, to disappear. With every successive month, he was seen less and less around
     campus and in the media. He became more reclusive, and the aura around him, intentionally
     or not, only grew. Watchers of the Circle wondered,
Where is Ty and what is he planning?
These plans were kept unknown until they were revealed, and with each successive
     innovation brought forth by the Circle, it became less clear which had originated
     from Ty himself and which were the products of the increasingly vast group of inventors,
     the best in the world, who were now in the company fold.
    Most observers assumed he was still involved, and some insisted that his fingerprints,
     his knack for solutions global and elegant and infinitely scalable, were on every
     major Circle innovation. He had founded the company after a year in college, with
     no particular business acumen or measurable goals. “We used to call him Niagara,”
     his roommate said in one of the first articles about him. “The ideas just come like
     that, a million flowing out of his head, every second of every day, never-ending and
     overwhelming.”
    Ty had devised the initial system, the Unified Operating System, which combined everything
     online that had heretofore been separateand sloppy—users’ social media profiles, their payment systems, their various passwords,
     their email accounts, user names, preferences, every last tool and manifestation of
     their interests. The old way—a new transaction, a new system, for every site, for
     every purchase—it was like getting into a different car to run any one kind of errand.
     “You shouldn’t have to have eighty-seven different cars,” he’d said, later, after
     his system had overtaken the web and the world.
    Instead, he put all of it, all of every user’s needs and tools, into one pot and invented
     TruYou—one account, one identity, one password, one payment system, per person. There
     were no more passwords, no multiple identities. Your devices knew who you were, and
     your one identity—the
TruYou
, unbendable and unmaskable—was the person paying, signing up, responding, viewing
     and reviewing, seeing and being seen. You had to use your real name, and this was
     tied to your credit cards, your bank, and thus paying for anything was simple. One
     button for the rest of your life online.
    To use any of the Circle’s tools, and they were the best tools, the most dominant
     and ubiquitous and free, you had to do so as yourself, as your actual self, as your
     TruYou. The era of false identities, identity theft, multiple user names, complicated
     passwords and payment systems was over. Anytime you wanted to see anything, use anything,
     comment on anything or buy anything, it was one button, one account, everything tied
     together and trackable and simple, all of it operable via mobile or laptop, tablet
     or retinal. Once you had a single account, it carried you through every