- Feeling abandoned by everyone else in her life, Mae soon turns to Francis.
- After working away at her desk for an hour and a half, Mae tracks Francis down and heads to his dorm room on campus.
- Francis apologizes again for recording Mae without her permission, but Mae doesn't engage with the topic. Instead, she asks Francis if he's been able to track down the various foster families that he lived with when he was a child—something she knows he's been thinking of doing.
- Francis tells Mae that he has tracked the families down, but he hasn't made contact yet. Although he doesn't say much about it, he doesn't seem sure that he wants to find them at all.
- After Francis confesses to Mae that he once stayed with a foster family who had a daughter that he had a big crush on, he and Mae do a bit of sexy role-playing that leads to even sexier times.
- Francis finishes quickly, as usual.
- As Francis and Mae are lying in bed together afterward, he tells her that he has another fantasy. He wants her to rate him just as her client contacts rate their interactions with her.
- Mae refuses at first, and then she tells Francis that he "did fine" (2.11.45).
- After Francis gets annoyed and insists that Mae give him a rating, Mae finally caves and tells Francis that he scored 100 percent.
- Contented, Francis kisses Mae goodnight and goes to sleep.
- The next day, Mae heads to one of the Circle's boardrooms and joins Eamon Bailey, Tom Stenton, and the Gang of 40 so that her viewers can listen to the Circle's top employees discussing some of the directions that the company might be taking soon.
- Eamon Bailey kicks things off by talking about the more than 20,000 elected officials worldwide who have gone transparent.
- From there, Bailey introduces a discussion about governmental accountability, and he soon segues into a discussion about America's citizenry.
- Eventually, Bailey works around to the issue of voter participation in America and poses this question to the room: "What if your Circle profile automatically registered you to vote?" (2.12.23).
- Bailey walks the room (and Mae's hundreds of thousands of viewers) through his ideas, but when his presentation draws to a close, Mae makes a suggestion of her own.
- As Mae puts it, rather than simply having users' Circle profiles register them to vote, why not make it mandatory for all American citizens of voting age to have a Circle account and use it to vote?
- As the room starts to hash out Mae's idea, Mae meets some resistance from an unexpected source—her best friend, Annie Allerton.
- Although Annie doesn't come right out and say it, it seems as though she's not a fan of compulsory Circle membership, nor of the idea that the Circle might take over the American government's role in managing elections.
- Not surprisingly, Eamon Bailey and Tom Stenton aren't too impressed by Annie's behavior.
- Mae is on a roll, and she doesn't stop with mandatory Circle membership—pretty soon, she's talking about funneling all state and federal obligations through users' Circle accounts.
- Mae gets so swept up by the "rightness" of her own logic—and by the (nearly) unanimous agreement and validation in the room—that it doesn't even faze her when Tom Stenton remarks approvingly that her proposal might even eliminate the need for Congress.
- After the meeting, Mae feels a strange mixture of humility and pride at having had such an innovative and potentially groundbreaking idea. It makes her feel awesome to imagine that she might have a hand in perfecting participatory democracy in America—and maybe even around the whole world.
- Mae and Francis head to San Francisco to paint the town red and celebrate, and Mae gets recognized everywhere she goes.
- Even though some people online have pointed out that Mae's plan would lead to totalitarianism if it ever actually happened, Mae pushes past the haters and enjoys her success.
- All through the night, Mae and Francis drink and enjoy themselves and talk to the random strangers who come up to tell Mae how they can't wait until her ideas change the world.
- The next morning, Mae gets a series of calls from Kalden, but she doesn't answer any of them.
- When she sits down to check her messages at her computer, Mae sees that Eamon Bailey has written to tell her that the Circle is already moving forward with her ideas, and they hope to have a new voting platform ready within the week.
- By mid-morning, the Circle's engineers have a demo version of their new "democratic" platform, Demoxie, to show Mae and her viewers around the world.
- Mae visits the program's developers to see how it will work.
- After the presentation, Mae is greeted excitedly by a group of young Circlers who tell her how excited they are to see Demoxie move forward. As they tell her, even though they've never voted before and have always felt disconnected from their government, they're sure that this new technology will inspire America's youth to participate democratically to the utmost extent.
- Kalden continues to call Mae throughout the day, but Mae continues to ignore his calls.
- By lunchtime, the beta version of Demoxie is ready to be debuted on campus, and the Circle's employees are informed that a vote will be taking place at 12:45 p.m.
- Because she's feeling on top of the world, Mae decides that she's strong enough to answer Kalden's next call.
- Once he finally has her on the phone, Kalden tells Mae that her ideas simply can't go forward.
- More specifically, Kalden tells Mae that her plan to institute mandatory Circle membership is about to inaugurate "the world's first tyrannical monopoly" (2.15.14).
- Mae isn't having any of it, but she lets Kalden keep talking for a little bit longer. Soon, he asks her to denounce her own ideas at the next big company meeting, when her viewership will be huge.
- In response, Mae hangs up on him.
- Pretty soon, the beta test of Demoxie is ready to go, and every Circler is sent a series of questions to vote on. As they do, the results are calculated and communicated instantaneously after each individual question.
- The final question in the series is a bit of a joke: it simply asks the Circlers, "Is Mae Holland awesome or what?" (2.15.48).
- Thinking that it'll be funny to vote "no" rather than "yes," and expecting to be the only person on campus who does, Mae sends a frown rather than a smile.
- To her surprise, the vote's results reveal that she wasn't the only person to vote "no" rather than "yes"—in fact, about 3 percent of the Circlers on campus don't seem to agree that she's awesome.
- When Mae does the math and realizes that a full 368 Circlers on campus sent her a frown rather than a smile, she feels crushed.
- More than that, Mae feels as though she's literally being "stabbed" by her peers (2.15.51).
- As Mae wanders off to find somewhere she can have a few minutes to be alone, she runs into Annie.
- Annie looks more excited than she has in a long time, and she soon tells Mae why.
- Annie is going to be the test subject for the Circle's new PastPerfect program—the project that will allow anyone to trace their family's history in more detail than ever before.
- Mae gets through the conversation without revealing too much surprise and envy, but she's definitely rattled. Personally, she thought that she would have been the obvious choice for the project, and it annoys her to think that Annie has snatched it for herself.
- As Mae wanders off after her conversation with Annie, her mind starts to race with the deluge of information that she's been having to take in lately. As she walks, it occurs to her that she might actually know "too much" now, and that the human brain isn't meant to take in so much information (2.15.75).
- As she often does when she feels overwhelmed, Mae heads back to her desk in the Customer Experience office and starts to answer customer queries. As she does, she's faced with the ever-growing neediness and impositions that the customers throw her way, but she pushes through it all.
- That night, Mae heads to Francis' room.
- Mae and Francis have some typically quick hanky-panky, with Mae barely getting warmed up before Francis is finished, but when Francis asks her to rate him, Mae gives him another 10 out of 10.
- When Mae wakes up the next morning, she's still in a stew about the 368 people who cast votes against her general awesomeness.
- When Mae admits her feelings to Francis, he asks why she doesn't just look up the voter records to see who voted against her.
- Francis pulls up the records and scans the list, pointing out at least one name that Mae recognizes right away—that of Alistair Knight, the man whose Portugal-themed brunch she missed during her first week at the Circle.
- Before Francis can tell her any more of the names on the list, Mae covers her face and pleads with him to stop.
- Francis does stop, and Mae gets into the shower to calm down. There, she reassures herself that her feelings will pass and that someday she'll have the energy to seek out those 368 people and win them all over with her friendliness and goodwill.
- Later that day, Mae attends another big meeting at the Circle—this one focused on innovators and developers who are hoping that the Circle will buy their ideas and take them in under its wings.
- As the young innovators and developers—known to the Circle as Aspirants—present their ideas, Mae (and her millions of viewers) hear about technologies that will supposedly eliminate racial profiling by making convicted felons immediately identifiable within any crowd, technologies that will alert neighborhood residents any time a stranger enters their neighborhood, and technologies that will set off alarm bells any time violence occurs inside a home.
- Ostensibly, all of these technologies will help to safeguard the safety, security, and personal dignity of American citizens. So what if they also require unprecedented levels of surveillance?
- All Mae has to do is check her wristband to see that hundreds of thousands of viewers worldwide can't wait to see these new technologies implemented in their own homes and communities.
- When Mae returns to her desk after the meeting, she finds a written note from Annie. It asks her to meet Annie in the bathroom, and Mae follows through right away.
- Once Mae is sitting in the bathroom stall with her audio turned off, Annie gets straight to the point.
- The PastPerfect program has turned up some surprising and none-too-pleasant information about her family, and she's worried about the public's reaction.
- As it turns out, Annie's medieval English ancestors owned Irish slaves, and, as if that weren't bad enough, these ancestors were cruel and violent slave owners who quashed a rebellion by killing slaves mercilessly.
- Mae tells Annie not to worry and does her best to reassure her friend that the things her ancestors did 600 years ago have nothing to do with the person Annie is now.
- When the news about Annie's medieval ancestors breaks, Mae is proven right.
- For the most part, people don't really care, and Annie does her best to manage the PR and take it all in stride.
- Not long after the news about Annie's medieval ancestors breaks, Mae gets a handwritten letter from Mercer.
- In it, Mercer tells Mae that she should convince Annie to call off the PastPerfect project. He insists that nothing good is going to come of it, and he tells Mae that it's going to ruin Annie.
- Mercer also informs Mae that he intends to get off the grid entirely. As he tells her, he plans to head north and move into the woods, and he expects that he will eventually be joined by all of the others who refuse to take part in the totalitarian world that Mae is helping to create.
- Characteristically, Mae takes Mercer's letter as yet more proof that her ex has gone off the rails.
- And yet, all the same, Mae can't help but hope that she might still be able to bring Mercer around to her side.