- As Book II of The Circle opens, Mae is staring at a strange, semi-translucent shark that now lives in an aquarium on the Circle's campus.
- As we learn, Tom Stenton finally made his deep-sea trip to the Mariana Trench, and he brought back a number of never-before-seen species with him.
- As Mae wanders around the aquarium, she keeps up a running commentary for the large audience who can now watch her movements throughout the day.
- It's been a month and a half since Mae "went clear," and this is her new job: to show the world what life at the Circle is like.
- Mae intends to watch the next shark feeding, but she has a few minutes to kill before it happens.
- Guided by a headset that pipes "additional guidance" into her ears, Mae heads over to another aquarium to show her viewers another of the semi-translucent species that Tom Stenton brought back from the Mariana Trench.
- This one is an octopus.
- After that, Mae takes her viewers over to an aquarium full of similarly semi-translucent seahorses. One of them is the papa of all the others, and he is surrounded by a thousand tiny babies.
- When the shark's caretakers are ready to get started with the feeding, Mae heads back over to the shark tank. As if sensing that it's almost lunchtime, the shark is starting to whip itself into a frenzy.
- The shark's feeder has brought out a lobster for this particular meal, but rather than dropping it into the tank right away, she holds it over the water while she chats to Mae's audience about the eating habits that the shark has demonstrated so far.
- In the blink of an eye, the shark bites the lobster right out of the feeder's hand. Thankfully, the shark doesn't take her hand with it.
- Because the shark is nearly translucent, Mae and her viewers can track the lobster as it moves through every step of the beast's digestive system.
- After the shark digests the lobster, its feeder brings out a Pacific sea turtle as a second course.
- Mae is concerned that many of her viewers won't want to see a sea turtle being devoured, but from somewhere behind the scenes, Tom Stenton insists that the feeding will go forward as planned.
- This time, Mae's viewers get to see the shark unhooking its jaw to expand its mouth and chomp into the turtle with one giant bite, and it takes less than a minute for the shark to pulverize and digest the creature completely.
- As Mae watches the shark do its thing, she suddenly sees Kalden on the other side of the aquarium. She hasn't seen or heard from him since she went transparent.
- Mae glances down at the wrist monitor that lets her see whatever she's capturing on the camera that she wears around her neck, and she realizes that Kalden is standing too far back in the shadows for her to get a clear image of him.
- Soon, Kalden disappears, and Mae decides to follow him as discreetly as she can.
- Following the path she thinks he might have taken, Mae stops in the company newsroom, then continues on outside. She spots Kalden crossing the lawn, but he soon disappears around the corner of a building.
- In a few moments, Mae's cellphone rings. When she picks up, it's Kalden, and he tells her that he's jammed the wires so that none of her viewers can hear their conversation.
- Kalden cuts right to the chase and tells her that the company's imminent plans to "Complete" the Circle need to be stopped. He wants to set up a time for them to meet, but Mae hangs up on him.
- When her audio-visual team pipes in to ask Mae who it was, she tells them it was just "some lunatic" (2.1.72).
- Mae is feeling a bit shaky after Kalden's strange phone call, so she wanders over to watch a game of croquet.
- As she watches, Mae puzzles over the conversation with Kalden. She has no idea what he's going on about, and she doesn't even know what the Completion of the Circle is supposed to look like.
- Mae can't get her thoughts sorted out, and she doesn't know what to do. Should she report Kalden's phone call? Can she get away with keeping it secret? She has no idea.
- Mae needs to unwind and get her bearings, so she heads over to the Customer Experience office to put in a few hours of work.
- Mae gets to work, and as she does, she gets her first taste of some new initiatives that are changing the way the Circle conducts its client interactions.
- More than ever before, employees like Mae are expected to engage as deeply as possible with the clients who bring queries to them.
- As Mae engages with a customer named Nanci, she struggles to meet all of Nanci's demands within the short few minutes that the Circle allots for each customer interaction.
- Mae does her best to satisfy Nanci's demands (most of which have less to do with her client query and more to do with her emotional needs), and as she works, she muses about all of the ways in which transparency has helped her to become a better person.
- Just as Eamon Bailey insisted she would, Mae feels "liberated from bad behavior," and believes that she's becoming the best version of herself (2.2.10).
- That afternoon, Mae attends a Clarification ceremony in which another American governor and the governor's staff announce their commitment to "going clear."
- After the ceremony, Mae eats dinner with friends on campus and then attends a few campus events before calling it a night.
- Mae is now living permanently in one of the dorm rooms on campus, and she heads back to her room to start getting ready for bed.
- Shortly after 10 p.m., Mae takes off her camera and gets into bed.
- Once she's in bed, Mae tries to check the SeeChange cameras in her parents' house, but she finds that none of them are on. She tries to get in touch with her parents and then Annie, but no one answers.
- Bored, Mae surfs through some websites, does some online shopping, and tries to check up on Mercer Medeiros—who seems to have gone off the grid.
- Feeling restless and unsatisfied, Mae gets up and pours herself a drink, and she then goes back to the SeeChange website to look at video feeds from various locations around the world.
- After spending another few minutes trying to find Kalden online, Mae gets herself another drink and goes back to bed, thinking sexy thoughts about Kalden's tongue and hands.
- Eventually, Mae drifts off to sleep.
- The next morning, Mae wakes up and puts her camera back on, feeling re-energized and ready for another bright new day of transparency.
- Big things are happening on campus today. Representatives from health agencies, health insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies are all coming together to talk about information sharing among their institutions.
- Most importantly for Mae, though, is the fact that Annie is expected to return from a business trip overseas.
- Mae and Annie haven't had much opportunity to connect lately, and Mae is really excited to see her best friend again soon.
- Mae has some time to fill before Annie's arrival, and so she heads over to a complete a pre-scheduled visit at the building that houses the Circle's engineers. As she does, Mae gets a message from Dr. Villalobos, who asks her to stop into the clinic at some point before the day is done.
- At the Protagorean Pavilion, Mae meets up with a fellow Circler who walks her (and her audience) through a demonstration of some of the Circle's brand new educational technologies.
- As Mae's colleague explains, the Circle has been hired to design a new "data assessment system" for American students (2.5.17).
- Mae's guide soon introduces her (and her viewers) to another colleague of theirs, who explains that the Circle has developed a new ranking system that will tell any student, at any time, exactly where they stand among the other thousands of students in their state, or the other hundreds of thousands of students in the country as a whole.
- As the demonstration proceeds, Mae's audio-visual team prompts her to ask how this new technology will intersect with the company's TruYouth initiative.
- TruYouth is the company's new name for the ChildTrack program that Francis Garaventa has been developing, and as soon as Mae asks about the program, Francis himself walks into the room.
- Francis guides Mae and the others into his own office, where he and his coworker Jackie explain how Francis' child-tracking technology will be paired with the Circle's educational tools to keep an exhaustive record of everything every child ever does and learns at school.
- According to Francis, this won't just keep children safe, but it will allow parents, teachers, administrators, and all other concerned parties to "finally know the whole child" (2.5.73).
- After her appointment at the Protagorean Pavilion, Mae stalls for time outside while she waits for Annie's arrival.
- Mae knows that she's expected to spend some time highlighting a new sculpture that has recently been installed on campus, so she heads over to it to give her viewers a look.
- The sculpture was created by an unnamed Chinese dissident, and it depicts a massive, translucent plexiglass hand reaching "out from, or through" an equally massive screen (2.6.6).
- As Mae interviews other Circlers who are observing the sculpture, she sees a woman who looks like Annie walking past on the other side.
- Mae calls Annie's name and follows her, and eventually catches up. When she does, the two old friends share a slightly awkward chat as Annie does her best to put on a good face in front of Mae's camera.
- Annie also takes the opportunity to tell Mae's viewers about a new initiative that the Circle is developing—one that will allow the Circle to map the past as well as the present by digitizing all photographic, print, and film records that have been archived throughout history.
- As it rolls out the program, the Circle intends to choose a volunteer who'll allow their family's history to be mapped with the new technology. Ideally, says Annie, it will be someone whose roots go back to the early history of the United States.
- As their conversation wraps up, Annie tells Mae that she needs to use the bathroom, and she invites Mae to come with her.
- As per usual, Mae turns her camera's audio off once she's in the bathroom stall.
- With the audio off, Mae and Annie are able to have a quick conversation that none of Mae's viewers can hear.
- To Mae's discomfort, there's an obvious tension between her and Annie. From Mae's point of view, Annie seems jealous that Mae has risen through the ranks so quickly.
- Annie turns down Mae's repeated requests to take her out for dinner or drinks, and the two of them part on awkward terms.
- After Annie leaves, Mae takes a few extra minutes to herself so that she can have a good cry.
- After Mae pulls herself together, she heads to the clinic for her appointment with Dr. Villalobos.
- Dr. Villalobos walks Mae through some basic information about her physical health, then explains a few key pieces of information about the Circle's newest medical data program.
- Eventually, Dr. Villalobos reveals the real reason for Mae's visit, and, to Mae's surprise, it has nothing to do with her own health.
- The reason that Dr. Villalobos has called her in is that Mae's parents have covered up some of the SeeChange cameras that the Circle had installed throughout their home.
- As Dr. Villalobos tells Mae, the Circle can't monitor her father's health if her parents are actively withholding information from the company.
- Mae is embarrassed and angry, and she promises to visit her parents right away to see what's up.
- As Mae drives to Longfield that evening, she starts to wonder if her parents have been foolish enough to be influenced by Mercer's crazy ideas about the Circle's surveillance technologies.
- Mae also fumes as she imagines that Annie will find some way of using her parents' missteps to her own advantage.
- As Mae drives, she thinks about Annie's own family, which dates all the way back to the Mayflower.
- Along with that sense of history comes a sense of snobbery, she thinks—or it does for Annie's mother, at least.
- Despite her frustration with her parents, Mae is expecting a good visit home.
- As Mae remembers, after the first visit she made once she had gone transparent, she was flooded with messages from thousands of viewers worldwide who wanted to share their goodwill and offer advice about her father's medical care.
- Mae had been so moved by the outpouring that she publicized her parents' private email and mailing addresses so that they too could experience the very same joy.
- Mae is looking forward to inspiring another flood of affection today.
- When Mae reaches her parents' home, she finds them making dinner. Mae helps them with the preparations—taking some time to do some product placement while she's at it—and then sits down to eat with them.
- At the dinner table, Mae brings up the issue of the SeeChange cameras.
- Mae's parents play it cool, telling her that they'll get the cameras fixed as soon as possible, and they quickly assent to everything else that she says.
- When Mae eventually offers a toast to her parents—and to the thousands of people who sent them messages after the last time she visited—her parents take the opportunity to ask Mae's viewers to send them good thoughts, but not messages, from now on. As they explain, having to read through thousands upon thousands of messages, and to reply to every one, has been intensely time consuming for them and just isn't manageable.
- Mae's parents do their best to express their gratitude, but they reiterate their hope that Mae's viewers won't continue to deluge them.
- Mae is shocked, and she tells her parents how awful and ungrateful they sound, but they stand firm.
- After supper, Mae watches Basic Instinct with her parents and then gets ready to leave. When she does, her mother gives her an envelope from Mercer.
- Once she's sitting in her car, Mae opens the envelope and sees that it contains a very long letter—one that's addressed to Mae's viewers as well as to her.
- Mercer's letter starts out by reiterating Mae's parents' comments about how stressful it was for them to deal with thousands upon thousands of messages from people who became annoyed when they didn't receive immediate replies.
- The letter also makes it clear that Mercer helped Mae's parents to disable the cameras in their home.
- Mae doesn't get through much of the letter—she stops when she sees that it goes on for pages and pages more—but she decides to return to the house to see if her parents are really as upset with her as Mercer seems to think.
- When she gets back to the house, Mae sees that her parents aren't in the kitchen or the living room. Suddenly worried, she runs upstairs into their bedroom, and, in doing so, surprises them in the middle of a very intimate moment.
- A very intimate moment, if you get what we're saying.
- Mae and her parents realize immediately that everything Mae just saw was also seen by her viewers worldwide.
- Mae backs out of the room in embarrassment and telephones the Circle.
- Pretty soon, Mae's on the line with Eamon Bailey himself, who tells her that there's no reason to delete the footage. He urges her to stay strong and to be a good role model for transparency.
- As Mae drives back to the Circle's campus, she tells herself that she'll never leave it again. Compared to the chaotic, disorderly world beyond its borders, it's the only safe refuge in an insane and dirty world.
- Mae arrives on campus at midnight, and feeling jittery, she heads to her desk in the Customer Experience office.
- There, Mae finds messages waiting for her from her parents. She tries to soothe their worries by forwarding appreciative messages from her viewers—"messages that celebrated that an older couple, dealing with MS no less, could still be sexually active" (2.10.4)—but they soon plead with her to stop. Not only that, but they ask her not to contact them anymore—not unless she's willing to do it absolutely privately.
- As Mae answers client queries, she starts engaging with Edward, a customer who asks her to add him to a number of social and professional networks.
- As Mae tries to work, Edward continues to inundate her with requests and messages, and soon his daughter Helena has joined the party and is requesting that Mae help her to get a job at the Circle.
- As Mae tries to keep up with her fast-paced work, Edward and Helena continue to send her needy message after needy message, passive-aggressively demanding her help.
- Mae starts to drift a little. She assents to Edward and Helena's requests, and she starts to try tracking Mercer online. Once again, she finds that he seems to be disappearing from the web.
- Mae is losing focus and is starting to feel as though she's losing her grip, so she decides to answer some survey questions to help her get back on track.
- Soon, Mae is able to lose herself in the rhythm of her work and to feel more like herself again.