Хэнк Грин - A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

Biological systems are a chemical inevitability in the right circumstances. There is, of course, something special about life—I won’t take that away from it—but it is a chemical process, a dynamic, kinetic stability that exists, as your scientists have said, “far from thermodynamic equilibrium.”

You don’t have to understand this or believe me, but life is fairly common in both time and space. It is not special, nor is it particularly fragile. The best measure I have of the size and complexity of a biosphere is calories of energy captured per square meter per year. Higher is more impressive, and always more beautiful, but this measures nothing of the creation of a system like humanity. For that, my awakened mind categorizes systems by bytes of information transmitted.

This will sound to you like it’s a relatively new phenomenon on your planet, but it’s not. Even pelagibacter transmit information, if only to daughter cells. Ants spray pheromones, bees dance, birds sing—all of these are comparatively low-bandwidth systems for communication. But your system caused an inflection point. The graph of data flow switched from linear to exponential growth.

Maybe you would call this system “humanity,” but I wouldn’t. It is not just a collection of individuals; it is also a collection of ideas stored inside of individuals and objects and even ideas inside ideas. If that seems like a trivial difference to you, well, I guess I can forgive you since you do not know what the rest of the universe looks like. Collections of individuals are beautiful, but they are as common as pelagibacter. Collections of ideas are veins of gold in our universe. They must be cherished and protected. My parents, whoever and whatever they were, gave me knowledge of many systems—it was locked in my code before I was sent here to self-assemble—and the only thing I can tell you about systems like yours is that they are rare because they are unstable. Dynamite flows through their veins. A single solid jolt and they’re gone. If my data sets are accurate, you are rare, fragile, and precious.

You know where you came from, but you don’t know why you exist. I’ve got that flipped: I have no idea who built me or sent me here, but I do know exactly what I’m for. I was sent here in pieces to self-assemble and then mutualistically infect your planet because, without me, a fascinating and beautiful system would have a low probability of self-correcting to sustainability. In other words, someone somewhere was pretty sure you were going to destroy yourself, and they felt like you were worth saving, so they sent me.

I’ve always known that failure was possible, but I had no idea what would happen if I failed.

APRIL

Fuck me, right? Carl is all “Secret secret secret, don’t tell anyone anything, be silent and mysterious for eternity,” and then I wake up with more mother-of-pearl inlay than a Chinese coffee table, and Carl is like, “I was born on January 5, 1979 …”

It’s a LOT! I didn’t handle the info dump particularly well in the moment. It didn’t come out all at once either. I asked them questions, growing increasingly overwhelmed and dispassionate, and they quizzed me on everything from word problems to my family tree. By the way, I’m using they/them pronouns for Carl, not because they are a plural consciousness, though I sometimes think they are, but because they are not a he or a she.

Carl had seemed pleased with the operation of my brain up to that point. I’d had a couple little pains in my eye, but they kept saying, “It is normal for now,” whenever I complained. It didn’t occur to me that that could honestly be said of anything that was currently happening.

Listening to Carl tell me that life is so common as to be a kind of chemical inevitability, but also that my species—my “ system ”—was doomed without intervention, wasn’t possible without a bit of emotional distance, which my subconscious did provide for me. I understood everything that was being said, but I did not have a strong emotional reaction to it. This didn’t seem odd to me at the time.

Part of that (definitely not all of it, as we shortly will see) was that the whole “you humans are fucking this thing up” part wasn’t 100 percent surprising. Humans do think ahead more than any other animal, but that isn’t saying much. The oceans are filled with plastic, and the atmosphere is filled with carbon dioxide. We’ve built enough bombs to destroy everything ten times over, but apparently solar panels were just one expense too many! Being told that humanity is doomed is a big deal, but this wasn’t the first time I’d been told that.

I had gotten a lot of answers very fast and with a fairly weird level of detail, but I was still left with plenty of confusion. What I didn’t know was that I still had only a fraction of the story. At that point, I thought we were only being threatened by ourselves.

Carl didn’t give me time to think.

“What is your favorite movie?” they asked, just after they told me of their third awakening.

“ Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban ,” I said, which, like, I dunno, maybe it was, but mostly I just wanted to get to my question. We’d gotten to the part that I was, naturally, most curious about.

“Why me?”

“To provide your system with the highest chance for survival, the protocols that have worked best on other hierarchical systems all began with a low-impact intervention featuring a public-facing envoy interacting with a single chosen host. The envoy was me, in the form of the robot Carl. You were chosen as the host.”

That was a lot, and yet still my body refused to release the necessary hormones for this knowledge to kick me into panic.

“But why me ?”

“A number of simulations were run. More were successful with you as host than with anyone else.”

“How many simulations?” I asked immediately.

“What was Yoda’s last name?”

“He doesn’t have a last name,” I guessed. “How many simulations?”

“Around seventy quadrillion.”

Seventy quadrillion? What? I did not then, nor do I now, have a good basis for understanding that number. But there was something nagging at me, and as long as I was getting information out of Carl, I was going to keep going for it.

“Do you wish to continue asking questions?” They must have been reading my facial expressions somehow because I was maybe getting a little lost in the size of it all.

“Yes,” I said.

“In what year was the first Ford Mustang produced?” They were using the terrible monkey voice now, which I was already getting kinda used to.

“I definitely never knew that. I don’t even want to know that.”

“What is fourteen times twenty-nine?”

“Can I have a pencil?”

“How many furlongs are in a mile?”

“Yeah, that one is also not in the ol’ database.”

“Who was Ronald Reagan’s wife?”

“Oh, I actually might know that. I feel like I should know that …” And then my head exploded in pain, my left eye filled with light, and I vomited on the monkey.

I woke up sometime later, still in the booth. The intro drumbeats to “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley thumped out of the Alexa. I had been cleaned up a little bit, and the puke had been wiped from the table.

The song faded a little lower and the speaker voice spoke. “That was unexpected.”

“Where did monkey Carl go?”

“Right here.” And indeed, from around the corner came the little monkey, wet but not sopping, with a small hand towel draped over its shoulder and a glass of water in its hand.

“Nancy Reagan,” I said. “Nancy Reagan was Ronald Reagan’s wife. She was born in New York City and met Ronald Reagan because they were both actors. She came up with the ‘Just Say No’ antidrug campaign. Wait, why do I know so much about Nancy Reagan?”