Хэнк Грин - A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“Can you not tell them?” Peanut said, still shaking with the rush of the experience.

“What?” Sid asked.

“Can we just make out like it went fine for us all, like we had an amazing time. It was amazing. It was so amazing …” And then a wave of shaking hit him and he closed his eyes tight.

“I have to log it, but those reports are confidential, only for senior and medical staff,” Dr. Rhode said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Of course. We all had a great first experience in the Altus Space. Let’s take a little more time. We can just hang in our recliners for a while, yeah, Dr. Rhode?”

“Sure, we were scheduled in this room for another fifteen minutes.”

When our fifteen minutes were up and Peanut was looking a little more solid, Dr. Rhode opened the door and we all left, trying to look as happy and inspired as possible. I’d expected to go back to performing for Har and Marigold, but instead, my day got even weirder.

Sippy and Peanut froze in their tracks, and I suppose I did too because Peter Petrawicki was sitting in the hall looking up at us.

Oh fuck , I thought. I’d snuck in, and he’d found out. But too late. I’d seen it. He couldn’t take that away from me now.

“Mr. Petrawicki,” Sippy enthused. “This is amazing. I mean, it’s earth-shattering.” Petrawicki nodded. Sippy continued, “I need to know more right now. Who is going to tell us more!”

Peanut’s eyes shifted. He was smiling like he was excited, but his eyes kept creeping back to the floor.

“You two are going to continue your orientation. Miranda here, or should I say Diggles”—he smiled—“is going to come with me.”

I tried to control my breathing as I walked behind Peter toward a staircase. I was thinking, How possible is it that these people, who are doing something so gigantic that taking any risks with the knowledge of it is an existential threat, are going to actually literally murder me right now?

I decided, very firmly, that I needed to say absolutely nothing. We went into Peter’s big corner office. He sat on a couch and gestured me to the plush red chair next to it.

“I’m sorry about your friend.”

“How did you hear about that?” I blurted.

“I didn’t hear, it’s easy to spot. We call it body dislocation. It is uncommon, but seems to be completely random. I’m sure Dr. Rhode will have a full report for me. I have heard it is a truly unpleasant experience.”

“What causes it?”

He looked down at the table for a while, thinking.

“It’s complicated. I don’t think anyone really understands it completely, but the only reason Altus’s software works is that our minds fill in a tremendous amount of detail, even in normal IRL environments. We don’t have to physically model your entire body, we have to tell your brain that your conscious mind inhabits your body. If we do it correctly, the consciousness snaps straight into the body and you get to exist in your body in the Altus Space. When it feels as real as the Space, the mind provides the detail in much the way it would in a dream.”

I wanted so badly to ask him how any of this was working at all, but I also didn’t want to do anything he would see as threatening, so I just let him keep talking.

“Sometimes the body appears separate from the consciousness, which is bad. It looks dead, and you see it, and that’s upsetting. But in body dislocation, the consciousness hits the body imperfectly, and the brain has to interpret seeing not out of the eyes, but out of the chin, or the chest, or the hand. The mind can’t handle it, and it instantly rearranges the body. Arms become heads, feet become knees. Proprioception completely fails. It results in extreme vertigo and is apparently extremely unsettling.” He said this like he wasn’t describing my friend who was vomiting up his entire body a half hour ago.

“The first sign that something is wrong is when the blood pressure and heart rate spike, but it all happens so quickly that by the time we read the reaction and begin shutting down the software, the psychological impact is done. It’s really terrible. I’m very happy it didn’t happen to you.”

He seemed sincere, but remembering my commitment to myself, I stayed quiet.

Peter Petrawicki stayed quiet too.

He was quiet for a long time.

I was quiet for longer.

“You were right yesterday,” he said finally. “That’s why I got angry. People in this company have seen me that angry only a handful of times. But I had no right to be upset. I thought I was going to send you home. But I was up all night thinking about what you said. I went through it word for word.”

I later found out this was true. Altus recorded pretty much everything that happened without anyone knowing. There was no law against it in Val Verde.

“I was pitiable. I was pathetic. I was chasing something so deeply boring and insular. And you’re right, I was just going where the wind was blowing. I was chasing attention. I never really cared about Carl, I cared about getting attention so I could leverage it. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with collecting capital for capital’s sake, but it isn’t interesting. It’s not like what we’re doing here.”

“No, it’s nothing like what you’re doing here,” I agreed.

“The world is a mess right now, and we’re going to fix it. People can’t live without the Dream anymore, but we can bring it back, except better.” He shook his clenched fists a little as he said it.

For one glistening moment, I had been a believer, and then I had seen Paxton. They certainly weren’t advertising body dislocation in the orientation pamphlets.

“Will it happen to him every time he goes to the Space?” I asked, suddenly worried about Paxton.

He looked at me for a long time and then said, “Can I trust you?”

I mean, obviously not. He should know that, right?

“Sure, I’m here for twelve months. Who am I going to tell?”

He looked at me really hard, like he wanted me to believe he was a mind reader.

“It will happen every time he tries, though he probably will not try again.”

“Could it happen to me?”

“Body dislocation? No. As far as we can tell, once you have occupied your body in the Space once, you will always do it successfully. Your mind knows what to expect.”

“And I work here now?”

“You work here now, though I hope that you understand that we’re going to monitor you closely. You’re a security risk.”

“What do you mean?”

“I went on national TV and outed your friend as a bisexual because it would win me points. You should hate me. Whether or not you do, I can’t tell. We want you to work here, but we don’t trust you. Don’t be too hurt, we don’t trust anyone.”

It was telling that he had taken responsibility for the thing he did, outing April. But he did not mention the things done in his name. This was always the way of these strongmen. They would craft the fear so carefully and then toss it into the world for everyone to use. And when someone took that fear and destroyed with it, they were just “unstable” or “mentally ill.”

Peter radiated the power that he’d gained. And he was right: Part of that power was earned trading against April. Bringing her down is what brought him up, and now he was capitalizing on that clout and April was dead. In that moment I felt the kind of rage where you really aren’t in control anymore, when your animal instincts tie together with your human emotions and words become wild and uncontrollable weapons. Looking back, the thing that made me most angry was how human he was starting to seem, and how important his work actually was. I almost got myself in trouble, but I kept hanging on to his words and keeping quiet. He had said that I was a security risk, and I was. I also needed to maintain my ability to be a security risk to Altus, and I already had an idea for how I was going to get it done.