Mae arrives at The Circle for her first day, overwhelmed by the sprawling glass campus and its thousands of employees.

Bailey presents SeeChange, a network of small cameras planted globally to make public spaces visible to anyone online.

Mae enrolls her parents in The Circle's health insurance, dramatically improving her father's multiple sclerosis treatment.

Mae is caught by police for taking a kayak from a rental agency without authorization.

Bailey meets privately with Mae after the police incident and steers her toward publicly embracing full transparency.

Mae joins Bailey on stage at Dream Friday and announces she will immediately begin broadcasting her entire life.

Kalden secretly contacts Mae while she is broadcasting and warns her that The Circle must be stopped.

Mae accidentally films her parents having sex while broadcasting; Bailey refuses to delete the footage from the cloud.

Mae proposes requiring all voting-age citizens to hold a Circle account, an idea that becomes Demoxie.

Mae presents SoulSearch live before thousands of Circlers, demonstrating how crowdsourcing can locate anyone in the world.

SoulSearch is used to locate Mercer in rural Oregon; a mob chases him until he drives off a cliff and dies.

Bailey comforts Mae after Mercer's death, calling him a disturbed antisocial young man who refused to accept help.

Bailey introduces Mae to the third Wise Man, Ty Gospodinov, whom she immediately recognizes as Kalden.

Ty meets Mae secretly in an underground facility and begs her to help derail The Circle's Completion.

Mae watches Annie breathe through a respirator and decides to approach Bailey and Stenton about reading people's thoughts.

Mae Holland joins The Circle, the world's most powerful tech company, and quickly distinguishes herself in customer experience while becoming dazzled by the campus's utopian promises. When she is caught stealing a kayak, Circle leader Bailey uses the incident to manipulate her into going transparent, broadcasting her entire life to millions of viewers. As The Circle's public face, Mae becomes central to increasingly invasive projects, including Demoxie, which would make all citizens dependent on The Circle to participate in democracy. The SoulSearch demonstration ends in catastrophe when it is turned on Mae's ex-boyfriend Mercer, who dies driving off a cliff to escape a pursuing mob. When Mae discovers that the mysterious Kalden is actually Circle co-founder Ty Gospodinov, she chooses power over his warnings, reporting him to the other leaders and cementing her allegiance to the company's totalitarian vision.

Mae Holland's rise through The Circle and its march toward totalitarian control.

Annie pranks Mae with a fake ugly cubicle before whisking her away on a tour of the lavish campus.

Mae meets Francis at a campus party thrown by Bailey after wandering drunk and alone through the crowd.

Mae encounters the mysterious Kalden lingering near her workspace and finds herself intrigued despite her suspicions about him.

Gina sets up Mae's social media accounts—including InnerCircle, Zing, and PartiRank—and makes clear they are mandatory job requirements.

Dr. Villalobos fits Mae with a health-monitoring bracelet and tricks her into swallowing a tiny sensor to track her vitals.

Dan reprimands Mae for her low PartiRank and for spending weekends away from campus instead of attending community events.

Mae stays up all night obsessively raising her PartiRank, climbing from below 9,000 to above 3,000.

Francis secretly records his sexual encounter with Mae; she discovers the footage and furiously demands that he delete it.

Stenton presents Stewart the Transparent Man and introduces Congresswoman Santos, who becomes the first politician to go transparent.

Mae has sex with Kalden in a hidden cave beneath The Circle campus after following him underground.

Thousands of SeeChange cameras are installed across The Circle campus, putting all employees under constant global observation.

Annie returns from a business trip in Germany and describes PastPerfect, a project to map the full genealogy of any person.

PastPerfect reveals that Annie's ancestors enslaved people and that her parents once watched a man drown without intervening.

Annie posts a zing questioning whether everyone should know everything; a Circle employee quietly edits it to remove the dissent.

Annie collapses at her desk and falls into a coma, her breakdown attributed to stress and exhaustion.

From her first day on campus, Mae is gradually absorbed into The Circle's culture through mandatory social media accounts, health-monitoring devices, and relentless pressure to participate in community life at all hours. She forms complicated romantic entanglements with Francis and the elusive Kalden, both of which involve surveillance in troubling ways—Francis secretly films their sexual encounter while Kalden leads Mae into restricted underground areas. Key Circle milestones, including the launch of political Clarification and the installation of campus-wide SeeChange cameras, push the company closer to total transparency over society. Meanwhile, Mae's friend Annie embarks on the PastPerfect genealogy project, which uncovers shameful family secrets and drives her toward a catastrophic mental breakdown. The pool tracks these parallel arcs—Mae's ascent and Annie's collapse—to show how The Circle ultimately consumes even its most devoted insiders.

The relationships, systems, and surveillance moments that built Mae's new world.

Renata tells Mae she already knows Mae loves Calder's work, revealing how thoroughly The Circle tracks employees' personal data.

Francis presents LuvLuv using Mae's personal information without her knowledge; an embarrassed Mae slips out of the auditorium.

Mae visits her parents and finds Mercer there; they argue bitterly about social media and The Circle's threat to privacy.

Kalden appears at a campus circus and pulls Mae out of harm's way when a sword-wielding performer stumbles toward her.

Mae and Annie search The Circle's directory for Kalden and discover that no record of him exists in the system.

Josiah tells Mae that keeping her kayaking experiences to herself is selfish and that she has an obligation to share them.

Senator Williamson publicly declares The Circle a monopoly that must be broken up but is swiftly discredited and silenced.

Mae photographs Mercer's chandelier and posts it to design feeds with his contact details, all without asking his permission.

Mae takes a kayak without authorization at night and finds unexpected comfort in accepting what she cannot know.

During a broadcast visit, Mae's parents struggle to behave naturally on camera and beg her to give them privacy.

A Demoxie trial poll reveals that 3% of Circlers do not think Mae is awesome, a result that devastates her.

Annie volunteers to be PastPerfect's first subject, hoping the high-profile project will help her reclaim status above Mae.

Mercer sends Mae a letter saying he is moving deep into the forest to live beyond The Circle's reach.

Ty secretly passes Mae a note after the shark feeding and disconnects her broadcast so they can meet privately.

Mae tells Ty she now sees everything clearly, then reports his plan to sabotage The Circle to Bailey and Stenton.

From the moment Renata casually reveals she already knows Mae's personal interests, small revelations accumulate into a portrait of creeping surveillance and eroding autonomy. Mae ignores early warnings from Mercer and clues about Kalden's hidden identity, instead embracing Circle culture and rationalizing each new intrusion. When she posts Mercer's contact information online without his consent and faces no consequences, she quietly crosses a moral line that will widen throughout the novel. After going transparent, Mae's family becomes collateral damage as her parents struggle to live normally under constant broadcast, exposing the human cost of The Circle's ideology. The pool's most decisive moment arrives when Mae betrays Ty—the only insider who fully understood The Circle's dangers—by reporting him to Bailey and Stenton, choosing power and certainty over love and conscience.

The warnings, decisions, and betrayals that revealed The Circle's true ambitions.