The Circle

swiveling in her chair. He thought
     they were being friendly. “You had an InnerCircle survey question and I answered it.
     I assume you approve of the Circle sending aid to Yemen?”
    She pictured, briefly, burying her fist in his face.
    “Please leave,” she said.
    “Mae. No one’s watched the video. It’s just a part of the archive. It’s one of ten
     thousand clips that go up every day here at the Circle alone. One of a billion worldwide,
     every day.”
    “Well, I don’t want it to be one of the billion.”
    “Mae, you know technically neither one of us owns that video anymore. I couldn’t delete
     it if I tried. It’s like news. You don’t own the news, even if it happens to you.
     You don’t own history. It’s part of the collective record now.”
    Mae’s head was about to explode. “I have to work,” she said, managing not to slap
     him. “Can you leave?”
    Now he seemed, for the first time, to grasp that she really loathed him and did not
     want him near. His face twisted into something like a pout. He looked at his shoes.
     “You know they approved ChildTrack in Vegas?”
    And she felt for him, even if briefly. Francis was a desperate man who’d never had
     a childhood, had no doubt tried all his life to pleasethose around him, the succession of foster parents who had no intention of keeping
     him.
    “That’s great, Francis,” she said.
    The beginnings of a smile lifted his face. Hoping it might pacify him and allow her
     to get back to work, she went further. “You’re saving a lot of lives.”
    Now he beamed. “You know, in six months it could be all over. It could be everywhere.
     Full saturation. Every child trackable, every child safe forever. Stenton told me
     this himself. Did you know he visited my lab? He’s taken a personal interest. And
     apparently they might change the name to TruYouth. Get it? TruYou, TruYouth?”
    “That’s so good, Francis,” Mae said, her body overtaken by a surge of feeling for
     him, some mix of empathy and pity and even admiration. “I’ll talk to you later.”
    Developments like Francis’s were happening with incredible frequency in those weeks.
     There was talk of the Circle, and Stenton in particular, taking over the running of
     San Vincenzo. It made sense, given most of the city’s services were funded by, and
     had been improved by, the company. There was a rumor that Project 9 engineers had
     figured out a way to replace the random jumble of our nighttime dreaming with organized
     thinking and real-life problem solving. Another Circle team was close to figuring
     out how to disassemble tornadoes as soon as they formed. And then there was everyone’s
     favorite project, in the works for months now: the counting of the sands in the Sahara.
     Did the world need this? The utility of the project was not immediately clear, but
     the Wise Men had a sense ofhumor about it. Stenton, who had initiated the endeavor, called it a lark, something
     they were doing, first of all, to see if it could be done—though there seemed to be
     no doubt, given the easy algorithms involved—and only secondarily for any scientific
     benefit. Mae understood it as most Circlers did: as a show of strength, and as a demonstration
     that with the will and ingenuity and economic wherewithal of the Circle, no earthly
     question would remain unanswered. And so, throughout the fall, with a bit of theatricality—they
     dragged out the process longer than necessary, for it only took them three weeks to
     count—they finally revealed the number of grains of sand in the Sahara, a number that
     was comically large and did not, immediately, mean much to anyone, beyond the acknowledgement
     that the Circle did what they said they would do. They got things done, and with spectacular
     speed and efficiency.
    The main development, and one that Bailey himself zinged about every few hours, was
     the rapid proliferation of other elected leaders, in the U.S. and globally, who had
     chosen to go clear. It was, to most minds, an inexorable progression. When Santos
     had first announced her new clarity, there was media coverage, but not the kind of
     explosion anyone at the Circle had hoped for. But then, as people logged on and began
     watching, and began realizing that she was deadly serious—that she was allowing viewers
     to see and hear precisely what went into her day, unfiltered and uncensored—the viewership
     grew exponentially. Santos posted her schedule each