The Circle by Dave Eggers
They walked through a curving hallway and into a great open space, with at least a hundred Circlers working without division. It looked a bit like a midcentury stock market.
“As your viewers might know,” Terry said, “the Department of Education has given us a nice grant—”
“Wasn’t it three billion dollars?” Mae asked.
“Well, who’s counting?” Terry said, abundantly satisfied with the number and what it demonstrated, which was that Washington knew the Circle could measure anything, including student achievement, better than they ever hope to. “But the point is that they asked us to design and implement a more effective wraparound data assessment system for the nation’s students. Oh wait, this is cool,” Terry said.
They stopped in front of a woman and a small child. He looked about three, and was playing with a very shiny silver watch attached to his wrist.
“Hi Marie,” Terry said to the woman. “This is Mae, as you probably know.”
“I do know Mae,” Marie said in the slightest French accent, “and Michel here does, too. Say hello, Michel.”
Michel chose to wave.
“Say something to Michel, Mae,” Terry said.
“How are you, Michel?” Mae said.
“Okay, now show her,” Terry said, nudging Michel’s shoulder.
On its tiny display, the watch on Michel’s wrist had registered the four words Mae had just said. Below these numbers was a counter, with the number 29,266 displayed.
“Studies show that kids need to hear at least 30,000 words a day,” Marie explained. “So the watch does a very simple thing by recognizing, categorizing and, most crucially, counting those words. This is primarily for kids at home, and before school age. Once they’re there, we’re assuming all this is tracked in the classroom.”
“That’s a good segue,” Terry said. They thanked Marie and Michel, and made their way down the hall to a large room decorated like a classroom but rebooted, with dozens of screens, ergonomic chairs, collaborative workspaces.
“Oh, here’s Jackie,” Terry said.
Jackie, a sleek woman in her mid-thirties, emerged and shook Mae’s hand. She was wearing a sleeveless dress, highlighting her broad shoulders and mannequin arms. She had a small cast on her right wrist.
“Hi Mae, I’m so glad you could visit today.” Her voice was polished, professional, but with something flirtatious in it. She stood in front of the camera, her hands clasped before her.
“So Jackie,” Terry said, clearly enjoying being near her. “Can you tell us a bit about what you’re doing here?”
Mae saw an alert on her wrist, and interrupted. “Maybe first tell us where you came from. Before heading up this project. That’s an interesting story.”
“Well, thank you for saying that, Mae. I don’t know how interesting it is, but before joining the Circle, I was in private equity, and before that I was part of a group that started—”
“You were a swimmer,” Mae prompted. “You were in the Olympics!”
“Oh, that,” Jackie said, throwing a hand in front of her smiling mouth.
“You won a bronze medal in 2000?”
“I did.” Jackie’s sudden shyness was endearing. Mae checked to confirm, and saw the accumulation of a few thousand smiles.
“And you had said internally that your experience as a world-class swimmer informed your plan here?”
“Yes it did, Mae,” Jackie said, now seeming to grasp where Mae was going with the dialogue. “There are so many things we could talk about here in the Protagorean Pavilion, but one interesting one for your viewers is what we’re calling YouthRank. Come over here for a second. Let’s look at the big board.” She led Mae over to a wallscreen, about twenty feet square. “We’ve been testing a system in Iowa for the last few months, and now that you’re here, it seems a good time to demonstrate it. Maybe one of your viewers, if they’re currently in high school in Iowa, would like to send you their name and school?”
“You heard the woman,” Mae said. “Anyone out there watching from Iowa and currently in high school?”
Mae checked her wrist, where eleven zings came through. She showed them to Jackie, who nodded.
“Okay,” Mae said. “So you just need her name?”
“Name and school,” Jackie said.
Mae read one of the zings. “I have here Jennifer Batsuuri, who says she attends Achievement Academy in Cedar Rapids.”
“Okay,” Jackie said, turning back to the wallscreen. “Let’s bring up Jennifer Batsuuri from Achievement Academy.”
The name appeared on the screen, with a school photo accompanying it. The photo revealed her to be an Indian-American girl of about sixteen, with braces and wearing a green and tan uniform. Beside her photo, two numerical counters were spinning, the numbers rising until they slowed and stopped, the upper figure at 1,396, the one below it at 179,827.
“Well, well. Congratulations, Jennifer!” Jackie said, her eyes to the screen. She turned to Mae. “It seems we have a real achiever here from Achievement Academy. She’s ranked 1,396 out of 179,827 high school students in Iowa.”
Mae checked the time. She needed to speed Jackie’s demonstration up. “And this is calculated—”
“Jennifer’s score is the result of comparing her test results, her class rank, her school’s relative academic strength, and a number of other factors.”
“How’s that look to you, Jennifer?” Mae asked. She checked her wrist, but Jennifer’s feed was silent.
There was a brief awkward moment where Mae and Jackie expected Jennifer to return, expressing her joy, but she did not come back. Mae knew it was time to move on.
“And can this be compared against all the other students in the country, and maybe even the world?” she asked.
“That’s the idea,” Jackie said. “Just as within the Circle we know our Participation Rank, for example, soon we’ll be able to know at any given moment where our sons or daughters stand against the rest of American students, and then against the world’s students.”
“That sounds very helpful,” Mae said. “And would eliminate a lot of the doubt and stress out there.”
“Well, think of what this would do for a parent’s understanding of their child’s chances for college admission. There are about twelve thousand spots for Ivy League freshmen every year. If your child is in the top twelve thousand nationally, then you can imagine they’d have a good chance at one of those spots.”
“And it’ll be updated how often?”
“Oh, daily. Once we get full participation from all schools and districts, we’ll be able to keep daily rankings, with every test, every pop quiz incorporated instantly. And of course these can be broken up between public and private, regional, and the rankings can be merged, weighted, and analyzed to see trends among various other factors—socioeconomic, race, ethnicity, everything.”
AG dinged in Mae’s ear. “Ask about how it intersects with TruYouth.”
“Jackie, I understand this overlaps in an interesting way with TruYouth, formerly known as ChildTrack.” Mae got the sentence out just before a wave of nausea and sweat overtook her. She didn’t want to see Francis. Maybe it wouldn’t be Francis? There were other Circlers on the project. She checked her wrist, thinking she might be able to quickly find him with CircleSearch. But then there he was, striding toward her.
“Here’s Francis Garaventa,” Jackie said, oblivious to Mae’s distress, “who can talk about the intersection between YouthRank and TruYouth, which I must say is at once revolutionary and necessary.”
As Francis walked toward them, his hands coyly behind his back, Mae and Jackie both watched him, Mae feeling sweat pool in her armpits and also sensing that Jackie had a more than professional feeling for him. This was a different Francis. He was still shy, still slight, but his smile was confident, as if he’d been recently praised and expected more.
“Hi Francis,” Jackie said, shaking his hand with her unbroken one, and turning her shoulder flirtatiously.
“Hello Jackie, hello Mae,” he said, “can I bring you into my lair?” He smiled, and without waiting for a response, turned and led them into the next room. Mae hadn’t seen his office, and felt conflicted about sharing it with her watchers. It was a dark room with dozens of screens arranged on the wall into a seamless grid.
“So as your watchers might know, we’ve been pioneering a program to make kids safer. In the states where we’ve been testing the program, there’s been an almost 90 percent drop in all crime, and a 100 percent drop in child abductions. Nationwide, we’ve had only three abductions, total, and all were rectified within minutes, given our ability to track the location of the participating children.”
“It’s been just incredible,” Jackie said, shaking her head, her voice low and soaked in something like lust.
Francis smiled at her, oblivious or pretending to be. Mae’s wrist was alive with thousands of smiles and hundreds of comments. Parents in states without YouthTrack were considering moving. Francis was being compared to Moses.
“And meanwhile,” Jackie said, “the crew here at the Protagorean Pavilion has been working to coordinate all student measurements—to make sure that all homework, reading, attendance and test scores are all kept in one unified database. They’re almost there. We’re inches away from the moment when, by the time a student is ready for college, we have complete knowledge of everything that student has learned. Every word they read, every word they looked up, every sentence they highlighted, every equation they wrote, every answer and correction. The guesswork of knowing where all students stand and what they know will be over.”
Mae’s wrist was still scrolling madly. Where was this 20 yrs ago? a watcher wrote. My kids would have gone to Yale.
Now Francis stepped in. The idea that he and Jackie had been rehearsing this made Mae ill. “Now the exciting, and blazingly simple part,” he said, smiling at Jackie with professional respect, “is that we can store all this information in the nearly microscopic chip, which is now used purely for safety reasons. But what if it provides both locational tracking and educational tracking? What if it’s all in one place?”
“It’s a no-brainer,” Jackie said.
“Well, I hope parents will see it that way. For participating families, they’ll have constant and real-time access to everything—location, scores, attendance, everything. And it won’t be in some handheld device, which the kid might lose. It’ll be in the cloud, and in the child him- or herself, never to be lost.”
“Perfection,” Jackie said.
“Well, I hope so,” Francis said, looking at his shoes, hiding in what Mae knew to be a fog of false modesty. “And as you all know,” he said, turning to Mae, speaking to her watchers, “we here at the Circle have been talking about Completion a lot, and though even us Circlers don’t know yet just what Completion means, I have a feeling it’s something like this. Connecting services and programs that are just inches apart. We track kids for safety, we track kids for educational data. Now we’re just connecting these two threads, and when we do, we can finally know the whole child. It’s simple, and, dare I say, it’s complete.”
Mae was standing outside, in the center of the western part of campus, knowing she was stalling until Annie returned. It was 1:44, far later than she thought it would be before her arrival, and now she worried about missing her. Mae had an appointment with Dr. Villalobos at two o’clock, and that might take a while, given the doctor had warned her that there was something relatively serious—but not health-serious, she’d made clear—to talk about. But crowding out thoughts of Annie and the doctor was Francis, who was suddenly, bizarrely, attractive to her again.
Mae knew the easy trick that had been played upon her. He was thin, and without any muscle tone, his eyes were weak, and he had a pronounced problem with premature ejaculation, yet simply because she’d seen the lust in Jackie’s eyes, Mae found herself wanting to be alone with him again. She wanted to bring him into her room that night. The thought was demented. She needed to clear her mind. It seemed like an appropriate time to explain and reveal the new sculpture.
“Okay, we have to see this,” Mae said. “This was done by a renowned Chinese artist who’s been in frequent trouble with the authorities there.” At that moment, though, Mae couldn’t remember the artist’s name. “While we’re on the subject, I want to thank all the watchers who sent frowns to the government there, both for their persecution of this artist, and for their restrictions on internet freedoms. We’ve sent over 180 million frowns from the U.S. alone, and you can bet that has an effect on the regime.”
Mae still couldn’t retrieve the artist’s name and felt the omission was about to be noticed. Then it came through her wrist. Say the man’s name! And they provided it.
She directed her lens toward the sculpture, and a few Circlers, standing between her and the piece, stepped out of the way. “No, no, it’s good,” Mae said. “You guys help show the scale of it. Stay there,” she said, and they stepped back toward the object, which dwarfed them.
The sculpture was fourteen feet high, made of a thin and perfectly translucent form of plexiglass. Though most of the artist’s previous work had been conceptual, this was representational, unmistakable: a massive hand, as big as a car, was reaching out from, or through, a large rectangle, which most took to imply some sort of computer screen.
The title of the piece was Reaching Through for the Good of Humankind, and had been noted, immediately upon its introduction, for its earnestness, anomalous to the artist’s typical work, which had a darkly sardonic tone, usually at the expense of rising China and its attendant sense of self-worth.
“This sculpture is really hitting the Circlers at their core,” Mae said. “I’ve been hearing about people weeping before it. As you can see, people like to take photos.” Mae had seen Circlers posing before the giant hand, as if it were reaching for them, about to take them, elevate them. Mae decided to interview the two people who were standing near the sculpture’s outstretched fingers.
“And you are?”
“Gino. I work in the Machine Age.”
“And what does this sculpture mean to you?”
“Well, I’m not an art expert, but I think it’s pretty obvious. He’s trying to say that we need more ways to reach through the screen, right?”
Mae was nodding, because this was the clear meaning for everyone on campus, but she felt it might as well be said, on camera, for anyone less adept at art interpretation. Efforts to contact the artist after its installation had been unsuccessful. Bailey, who had commissioned the work, said he had no hand—“you know me and puns,” he said—in its theme or execution. But he was thrilled with the result, and dearly wanted the artist to come to the campus to talk about the sculpture, but the artist had said he was unable to come in person, or even to teleconference. He’d rather let the sculpture speak for itself, he said. Mae turned to the woman with him.
“Who are you?”
“Rinku. Also from the Machine Age.”
“Do you agree with Gino?”
“I do. I mean, this feels very soulful to me. Like, in how we need to find more ways to connect. The screen here is a barrier, and the hand is transcending it …”
Mae was nodding, thinking she needed to wrap this up, when she saw, through the translucent wrist of the giant hand, someone who looked like Annie. It was a young woman, blond, about Annie’s height and build, and she was walking briskly across the quad. Rinku was still talking, having warmed up.
“I mean, how can the Circle find a way to make the connection between us and our users stronger? To me it’s incredible that this artist, so far away and from such a different world, expressed what was on the minds of all of us here at the Circle? How to do better, do more, reach further, you know? How do we throw our hands through the screen to get closer to the world and everyone in it?”
Mae was watching the Annie-lik
It was 1:49. She had to be with Dr. Villalobos in eleven minutes.
“Annie!”
The figure continued to walk. Mae was torn between really yelling, which typically upset the viewers, or running after Annie, which would cause the camera to shake violently—which also upset the viewers. She settled on a kind of speed walking while holding the camera against her chest. Annie turned another corner and then was gone. Mae heard the click of a door, the door to a stairway, and rushed to it. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought Annie was avoiding her.
When Mae entered the stairway, she looked up, saw Annie’s distinctive hand, and yelled up. “Annie!”
Now the figure stopped. It was Annie. She turned, slowly made her way down the steps, and when she saw Mae, she smiled a practiced, exhausted smile. They hugged, Mae knowing any embrace always provided for her viewers a semi-comical, and occasionally mildly erotic, moment, as the other hugger’s body swooped toward and eventually subsumed the camera’s lens.
Annie pulled back, looked down at the camera, stuck out her tongue and looked up at Mae.
“Everyone,” Mae said, “this is Annie. You’ve heard about her—Gang of 40 member, world-strider, beautiful colossus and my close personal friend. Say hi, Annie.”
“Hi,” Annie said.
“So how was the trip?” Mae asked.
Annie smiled, though Mae could tell, through the briefest of grimaces, that Annie was not enjoying this. But she conjured a happy mask and put it on. “It was great,” she said.
“Anything you’d like to share? How did things go with everyone in Geneva?”
Annie’s smile wilted.
“Oh, you know we shouldn’t talk about much of that stuff, given so much of it is—”
Mae nodded, assuring Annie she knew. “I’m sorry. I was just talking about Geneva as a location. Nice?”
“Sure,” Annie said. “Just great. I saw the Von Trapps, and they’ve gotten some new clothes. Also made of drapes.”