Хэнк Грин - A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“Can you walk back over to your bed?” the monkey rasped. “This body cannot carry you.”

“Why do I know so much about Nancy Reagan, Carl?” I said more loudly. I could feel the pressure building as my heart beat faster.

“Things aren’t going exactly as expected, please come over to the bed,” the smart speaker voice chimed in. The illusion that there were two of them was disorienting.

Suddenly I felt way less scared.

“Can I have some water?” I asked. And then I thought: I wasn’t acting right. None of this made sense. “Carl, why am I not freaking out more? I feel like I should be angry or scared, but I’m not.”

The monkey reached out to me with the cup. I swished some water in my mouth, and then, not knowing where to spit, I scrunched my face and swallowed.

“Can you lie down, April?” The smart speaker spoke in a soft tone.

“Carl, please answer me.” I knew something was wrong. Every time I felt my panic surge, as I was sure it should, it ebbed out of me.

Finally, after a long time, it spoke: “When people are hurt and go to the hospital, doctors give them painkillers so that they don’t hurt. And sometimes doctors give patients painkillers so that they are less scared. Your mind is currently regulating your fear.”

“My mind?”

“Yes, systems in your mind.”

“Systems that you put there,” I confirmed out loud, because it was obvious. I felt my anger surge and then wash out like a wave, something that you only know was there because of what it left behind.

“April, your mind has new abilities now. You accessed your link, and the bandwidth was higher than expected.”

“ ‘Link’? What did you do to me?” It was the obvious question. It was one thing to have a new body, another to have a new face, but what had happened to my mind?

“I had to rebuild you.”

“It seems like you did more than that!” My anger shot out a spike, but then it retracted and smoothed over again.

“I didn’t know how to limit you. Your legs, they’re stronger than before. You can lift more now. If you cut your new skin, it will heal immediately.”

“That’s my body, you know that isn’t the same,” I said.

“I know. You imagine yourself as your mind. And I had to change your mind to repair it and allow it to function with your body and avoid the pain you would otherwise be feeling.”

It was hard to understand what Carl was talking about for a bunch of really good reasons. Like, it’s hard enough to try to grasp the philosophy of mind and identity even when it isn’t being delivered by a … cylinder.

“You are a story that you tell yourself, and even if it is not always accurate, it is who you are, and that is very important to you. I did not know what else to do. Your brain was damaged, your mind too. I had to rebuild it, but your physiology is too beautiful. The integration was not too difficult, but replacing what was lost was. Your mind is different now. You have new abilities.”

“What … can I do?”

“Having an ability is not the same as having a skill. You can play piano, you just haven’t learned. Just as you can now receive and interpret radio signals, but haven’t yet learned how.”

“Radio … signals?” My mind was swimming. “What part of my mind was replaced by all of this?” I asked as my panic started to well up, the smooth pearl of my emotions growing jagged again.

“Not replaced. I attempted to restore whatever function was lost. No memories were lost. Indeed, your memory should be much better now. What you lost were systems for decision making.”

“Systems for decision making,” I repeated numbly.

“Yes, the frameworks you use for deciding on a course of action.”

“And what did you replace them with?”

“Approximations.”

“Expand on that.” I was starting to feel like I was talking to a Wikipedia article.

“Approximations based on my knowledge of you.”

“So you guessed.”

There was an unusual pause.

“Yes,” the speaker said finally.

“And did you think maybe I should have some say in this?”

“The alternative was leaving you incomplete.”

Every night, you brush your teeth, you change out of your clothes, you lie down in a bed. And every morning, you wake up. There’s that period in there, generally six to nine hours, in which you just aren’t anymore. Excuse me for having thought about this a lot, but how does it not terrify us that we spend a third of every day in a conscious unconsciousness, living inside a virtual reality created by our own minds but that somehow we don’t control? Like … what?!

I don’t want to make you afraid of sleep, sleep is dope, but this is the kind of thing you start to think about when you lose track of where “you” starts and ends because of how a piece of your brain, and maybe even the whole thing, is a best-guess estimation. If I am a story that I tell myself, then there are very real ways in which that story ended in a warehouse in New Jersey.

I don’t have a word for what happened to me, but it is scary and sad, and it felt like a betrayal. I was suddenly certain that Carl had replaced the parts of me that made me me. I stood up from the booth and said, “I would like to leave.”

“You can’t.”

“Well, that makes this a lot worse, doesn’t it. Because now I’m a prisoner and you’ve kidnapped me, experimented on me, and are confining me.”

The monkey jumped up on the table and said, “April, please stay. It would be dangerous for you to leave.”

“Because of what you did to me,” I accused.

“Because of what I had to do to you,” they croaked.

Whatever thing had been holding back my emotions finally broke, and I yelled, suddenly, “I’M NOT HUMAN ANYMORE!” The fear and anger hit hard then. “I’M. NOT. HUMAN. YOU TOOK THAT AWAY!” And then I realized a big part of the reason I was so upset, so I said it out loud: “YOU MADE ME WHAT THEY ALL SAID I WAS! FUCK! FUCK!!”

“April, please,” the monkey continued. “There is much more to explain.”

“I don’t have to do any fucking thing.” I walked away. There was a door in the back, by the stage, and I went toward it. The monkey stepped in front of me, screeching like they were actually a monkey. I kicked at it. The door was solid, big, and metal. It was the kind of door that held me in a warehouse office while the building began to burn. I shoved at the push bar. It did not move. It felt bolted in place. I slammed my hands against the door in frustration. I pulled my hands away and saw the dent my left hand had made.

The monkey came up behind, ceasing their wailing, and said, “There is much more I need to explain.” I slammed just my left hand against the door again, it bent outward. Rick Astley was finishing his song. Had it only been a few minutes since I woke up? Had my whole world changed that fast?

I planted my feet, pulled back my arm, and slammed the door right where the dead bolt should go. It flew out, taking a hunk of the door frame with it.

The darkness outside was jarring after the light of the bar. I stood for a moment, waiting for my eyes to adjust, but before they got the chance, I stepped out into the darkness.

MIRANDA

I woke up early the next morning and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I got dressed, packed my bag, and then, not knowing what else to do, went into the common room of the dorm that I’d walked through the night before. The building was obviously hastily made. The walls were painted a dusty green, but you could still see the seams in the drywall. There was no stove, just a microwave, two refrigerators, a couple different kinds of coffee makers, and a SodaStream. I went to the fridge and got out a bottle of home-carbonated bubble water and poured myself a glass.