Mae Holland Timeline and Summary

•  Back
• More 

• On a sunny day in June, Mae starts her brand-new job at the Circle.
• After a hectic but invigorating first week at the Circle, Mae spends the weekend with her parents, who have driven out to San Vincenzo to take her out to dinner.
• During her second week at work, Mae is given a scolding after she fails to attend a fellow Circler's Portugal-themed brunch. She also starts to spend more time with an attractive fellow Circler named Francis Garaventa, and she encounters a mysterious stranger named Kalden.
• On the Friday of Mae's second week at work, Francis humiliates Mae by using her as a very public test subject for one of the Circle's new dating apps. Mae decides that she never wants to see Francis again, and she grapples with her intense feelings of embarrassment.
• Late that afternoon, Mae sees that she's missed a number of messages from her mother, who's been trying to tell her that her father has had a seizure and that she needs to come home.
• Mae leaves campus and heads to her hometown of Longfield, California, to be with her parents. While there, she has an unpleasant run-in with her ex-boyfriend Mercer Medeiros, but the rest of the weekend passes mostly uneventfully.
• On Sunday afternoon, Mae's father has an embarrassing accident as he tries to get up off of the living room couch, and soon Mae's mother sends her away.
• During Mae's third week of work at the Circle, Mae's workload increases slightly as new "layers" are added to her responsibilities.
• Mae also has her first appointment at the company clinic, and that appointment leads to a wonderful new development in the lives of Mae and her parents. In no time at all, Mae's parents have been added to the Circle's medical plan, and Mae can rest easy knowing that her father will be getting the medical care and coverage he needs.
• On Monday night, Mae attends a circus on campus. There, she runs into Kalden again, and the two of them share a steamy goodbye kiss when they part.
• Over the next few days, Mae endures Annie's teasing about the mysterious gray-haired stranger that she's been lusting after lately. To Mae's frustration, though, she can't find Kalden anywhere on campus.
• At the end of the week, Mae's supervisor calls her into his office for a little chat about her performance so far. Although he praises the work that she's been doing, he scolds her for not being active enough on campus.
• After giving Mae a talking to, Dan passes her off to two company ambassadors, Josiah and Denise, who give her an even sterner lecture on the necessity of being more present on campus and on the company's social feeds.
• Afterward, Mae determines to do better, and she spends the next week working tirelessly to increase her presence online.
• Toward the end of the week, Mae feels lonely enough to contact Francis Garaventa and invite him to her dorm room. She soon regrets the decision, though, as Francis records their brief sexual encounter, without her consent, and then refuses to delete the video.
• The next day, Mae and her fellow Circlers view a presentation in which an American congresswoman pledges to "go transparent." At the reception that follows, Mae runs into Kalden again.
• Kalden convinces Mae to follow him down through a series of underground tunnels below the Circle's campus, and, after showing her where some of the company's storage servers are kept, he take her to a sexy bat cave—er, we mean a little hideaway where he's hidden a mattress and some blankets inside an underground cavern.
• There, things between the two get steamy.
• Over the course of the next few weeks at the Circle, Mae continues to adjust to new layers of work that are added to her job, and she follows the exciting developments that are said to be coming down the pipeline for the Circle.
• Eventually, Mae heads home to make another visit to her parents. While she's there, she has a major argument with her ex-boyfriend Mercer, and, when she leaves, she decides to see if there's any way that she can take a kayak out onto the bay.
• Since it's past 10 p.m. when Mae reaches her favorite kayak shop, she's not surprised to find it closed. She is surprised to find a kayak that hasn't been locked up properly, and, after hesitating for a few moments, she decides to take it out onto the water.
• When Mae eventually returns after her late-night aquatic joyride, she's apprehended by the police. The owner of the kayak shop eventually arrives on the scene to sort things out, and Mae is allowed to return home before the night is through.
• The next day, Mae is called in to her supervisor's office at work. Dan gives her another stern talking to about her behavior and tells her that this latest escapade has caught the attention of Eamon Bailey—one of the Circle's Three Wise Men.
• Late that afternoon, Mae is brought to Eamon Bailey's office for a formal meeting. There, Bailey impresses her with a number of the Circle's core ideals and convinces her of the perversity of secrecy and privacy.
• At the end of the week, Mae and Bailey appear on stage together at the Circle to turn Mae's recent actions into a very public teachable moment. Their presentation ends with Bailey's announcement that Mae will be "going transparent" immediately.
• Roughly six weeks later, Mae has settled into her new, very public role as a "transparent" Circler.
• There's palpable excitement at the Circle as Mae and her fellow Circlers contemplate Completion—whatever that will mean—and Mae is thrilled to be such an integral and public part of it all.
• Mae soon receives a disturbing phone call from Kalden, who tells her that the Circle must not be allowed to reach Completion. She decides that he's probably a corporate spy, after all.
• Over the course of the next few days, Mae has some tense encounters with her friend Annie Allerton and her former flame Francis Garaventa, but those encounters also reveal some of the new technologies that the Circle is planning to roll out soon.
• Mae also learns that her parents have been messing with some of the cameras that the Circle installed in their home, and so she heads back to Longfield to see what's up.
• Back home in Longfield, Mae realizes that her parents aren't grateful for the deluge of public affection that has come their way ever since Mae publicized their problems. They're even less grateful after Mae walks in on them in the midst of a very intimate moment and, in doing so, broadcasts that moment to the world.
• When Mae returns to the Circle's campus, she decides that she's never going to leave it again.
• Mae's parents soon sever contact with her, and because she can't reach Annie, Mae soon turns to Francis for a little human comfort and affection.
• Not long afterward, Mae attends a big meeting with the Circle's most important players. There, she makes a suggestion that pushes the company into an all new direction. Using her ideas as inspiration, the company decides to put together a voting system that will soon allow it to take over the management of America's electoral systems.
• After Mae inspires this shift in direction, things happen rapidly. The Circle's developers quickly move forward with the creation of the necessary platforms, and Mae receives a number of panicked phone calls from Kalden.
• Over the course of the next few days, life at the Circle is intense. Mae is worried to see that her friend Annie Allerton is starting to crumble under the stress of having her family's history made public with one of the Circle's new programs. At the same time, Mae is excited to see some of the other new technologies that the company is planning to bring on board.
• Soon, Mae herself has the opportunity to present one of the Circle's latest technologies to the world. In front of a live audience of thousands and an online audience of millions, Mae demonstrates how a new program called SoulSearch can be used to locate a known fugitive or an ordinary citizen in mere minutes.
• Sadly, Mae's demonstration results in Mercer Medeiros's death.
• One week after the demonstration, Mae joins Eamon Bailey and Tom Stenton in the Circle's aquarium center, where they expect to witness a never-before-seen event.
• Mae and the others are joined by Ty Gospodinov, the Circle's third Wise Man, and, when Eamon Bailey introduces Ty to Mae, Mae is shocked to discover that Ty is Kalden.
• As Mae, Stenton, Bailey, and Ty look on, a vicious shark that Stenton discovered in the depths of the Mariana Trench is allowed to devour the other species that Stenton brought back from the deep.
• After the presentation, Mae consents to meet up secretly with Ty, alias Kalden, one final time.
• In the same subterranean room where Kalden brought Mae before, Ty pleads with Mae to help him denounce and dismantle the Circle. After hearing him out, Mae tells him that she knows what she has to do.
• Months later, Mae sits by Annie Allerton's bedside as Annie lies in a coma. Mae has exposed Ty and ensured the safety of the Circle, and she couldn't be more proud of her decision.