In the dystopian novel The Circle, Google(s goog) and Facebook(s fb) have merged with other big tech companies to create a single, all-seeing and all-knowing social network. The work is fiction but a new patent application published last week makes the situation slightly less far-fetched.

In the application, Google describes a way to collect disparate messages from other applications — everything from social networks to email to SMS — and suggest an automatic answer. The idea is to help users make sure they don’t miss a message, and to save them time in responding to others’ “I got a new job” or “I’m having a baby” status updates.

Here’s how Google describes its proposed invention :

Many users use online social networking for both professional and personal uses […] It is extremely important for the users to act in an adequate manner depending upon which social network on…