Summary made by Twan Oligschlaeger
The main character of the book is Maebelline Renner Holland (age 24), who is referred to as
Mae.
The story takes place in California.
Part 1:
Annie is Mae’s best friend. In college they used to live together. In the first few weeks of
college, Mae broke her jaw and (even though they barely knew each other) Annie gave Mae
a lot of support and took care of her. This is why they became best friends.
Mae is working at Building 3B-East of Public Utility. The only reason why she accepted this
job was, because her Liberal Arts study had cost her a lot of money.
Mae is called "Black lightning", because all the other employees find her basic computer
skills to be special.
Her supervisor Kevin thinks that Mae wants to work there and treats her that way. He
addresses and praises her by calling her "protegee".
Everything at her workplace is made of Burlap, so Mae hates the fabric.
Annie knows that Mae dislikes her current office job and gets Mae a job at ‘The Circle’.
Renata gives Mae a small tour of the Circle on her first day of work.
Renata gets to hear through her retina interface and earpiece where Annie is. Annie says
that she will be late and so Renata shows Mae the way to her desk.
Mae sits on the 4th floor and can see all the way down to the ground because the hallways
are made of glass. All offices are also made of glass.
Mae disappointingly finds herself in a cubicle that is very similar to her old workshop. In the
end, it was Annie's joke to see what Mae would do. Mae is shown her real desk.
Each building has a name, Mae will work in the Renaissance at the Customer Experience.
The Circle invites a different entertainers every day and has a busy program.
The “Three Wise Men” are the founders of the Circle, who Mae can see on painting.
Ty Godpodinov was the first wise men. He hired the other two; Eamon Bailey and Tom
Stenton. After that he went under the radar.
Ty created Unified Operating System. Your TruYou account contains all your information in
one place.
, Stenton is the flashy CEO and isn’t afraid of lawsuits. That’s why he creates conflicted
feelings amongst Circlers.
Bailey is the face of the Circle and a happy guy. He has kids and preferers to be named
“Uncle Eamon”. He also buys varies historic books, to fill his enormous library and he lets the
ex-owners visit the library and read their books any time.
Mae realizes that she doesn’t want to work anywhere outside of the Circle, because the
outside world seems very chaotic compared to the Circle.
Mae meets a man named Francis at the party, but Annie interrupts them before they can do
anything. Mae finds Francis strange. Francis works in child security on abduction prevention,
because he and his brother and sister were taken away from their abusive parents.
However, his brother and sister were abducted after being send to different foster homes.
They were raped and thrown down a missile silo.
When shown her desk, Mae has to sign contracts and receives a new iPad where she has to
transfer all her data to. All her data will be stored in the Circle cloud. The only thing she
needs to do is learn the complicated password out of her head. Mae meets her boss Dan.
The slogan of the Circle = “Community First”. The circle needs to be a ‘human place’ next to
a ‘workplace’. It’s a core believe of the company.
The Renaissance, where the Costumer Experience is, is referred to as the foundation of the
Circle. This because everyone working in the Circle, starts working at CE.
Jared will be training Mae. He tells her that she has to make her reply mails personal and to
not act like a robot.
Mae needs to reply to emails in a personal way, after which she then needs to send a survey
to the customer, who will rate her. She can see her daily and average rating, and when the
rating is low, she needs to ask what she did wrong to the customer my sending another
survey. If her score is lower than 95, she needs possible extra training.
Via her second screen she can receive and send messages to Dan, Jared, Annie and others.
At the end of her first day, she had the highest score for of any newbie on their first day.
Eamon Bailey comes on stage (like he does every Friday) and talks about his new camera
invention. He uses his new camera to monitor beaches to look if its good enough weather
for surfing.
The cameras are little larger than your thumb, have the best resolution, are ‘everything
proof’, the batteries last 2 year, and cost only €95.
Bailey had put up a camera in Cairo to look for violation of human rights of the police. He
had also placed cameras in places such as Tiananmen Square and Pyongyang.
With a command he could see any place in the world here he had placed a camera.