The Circle

big inspiration
     to me. I love that thing he once said: ‘Things that exist exist, and everything is
     on their side.’ You ever see his stuff in person?”
    Mae was only passingly familiar with the work of Donald Judd—they’d done a few days
     on him in one of her art history classes—but didn’t want to disappoint Kalden. “No,
     but I love him,” she said. “I love his heft.”
    And with that, something new appeared on Kalden’s face, some new respect for, or interest
     in, Mae, as if at that moment she’d become three-dimensional and permanent.
    Then Mae ruined it. “He did this for the company?” she said, nodding at the massive
     red box.
    Kalden laughed, then looked at her, his interest in her not gone, but certainly in
     retreat. “No, no. He’s been dead for decades. This was just inspired by his aesthetic.
     This is actually a machine. Or inside it is. It’s a storage unit.”
    He looked at Mae, expecting her to complete the thought.
    She couldn’t.
    “This is Stewart,” he finally said.
    Mae knew nothing about data storage, but had been under the general idea that storing
     such information could be done in a far smaller space.
    “All this for one person?” she asked.
    “Well, it’s the storage of the raw data, and then the capacity to run all kinds of
     scenarios through it. Every bit of video is being mapped a hundred different ways.
     Everything Stewart sees is correlated with the rest of the video we have, and it helps
     map the world and everything in it. And of course, what you get through Stewart’s
     cameras is exponentially more detailed and layered than any consumer device.”
    “And why have it here, as opposed to stored in the cloud or in the desert somewhere?”
    “Well, some people like to scatter their ashes and some like to have a plot close
     to home, right?”
    Mae wasn’t precisely sure what that meant but she didn’t feel she could admit that.
     “And the pipes are for electricity?” she asked.
    Kalden opened his mouth, paused, then smiled. “No, that’s water. A ton of water’s
     needed to keep the processors cool. So the water runs through the system, cooling
     the overall apparatus. Millions of gallons every month. You want to see Santos’s room?”
    He led her through a door to another, identical, room, with another great red box
     dominating the space. “This was supposed to be for someone else, but when Santos stepped
     up, it was assigned to her.”
    Mae had already said too many silly things that night, and was feeling light-headed,
     so she didn’t ask the questions she wanted to ask, such as, How could these things
     take up so much space? And use so much water? And if even a hundred more people wanted
     to store their every minute—and surely millions would opt to go transparent, would
     beg to—how could we do this when each life took up so much space? Where would all
     these great red boxes go?
    “Oh wait, something’s about to happen,” Kalden said, and he tookher hand and led her back into Stewart’s room, where the two of them stood, listening
     to the hum of the machines.
    “Has it happened?” Mae asked, thrilling at the feel of his hand, his palm soft and
     his fingers warm and long.
    Kalden raised his eyebrows, telling her to wait.
    A loud rush came from overhead, the unmistakable movement of water. Mae looked up,
     briefly thinking they would be drenched, but realized it was only the water coming
     through the pipes, heading for Stewart, cooling all he’d done and seen.
    “Such a pretty sound, don’t you think?” Kalden said, looking to her, his eyes seeming
     to want to get back to the place where Mae was something more than ephemeral.
    “Beautiful,” she said. And then, because the wine had her teetering, and because he’d
     just held her hand, and because something about the rush of water set her free, she
     took Kalden’s face in her hands and kissed his lips.
    His hands rose from his sides and held her, tentatively, around the waist, just his
     fingertips, as if she were a balloon he didn’t want to pop. But for a terrible moment,
     his mouth was inanimate, stunned. Mae thought she’d made a mistake. Then, as if a
     bundle of signals and directives had finally reached his cerebral cortex, his lips
     awakened and returned the force of her kiss.
    “Hold on,” he said after a moment, and pulled away. He nodded toward the red box containing
     Stewart, and led her by the hand out of the room and into a narrow