Хэнк Грин - A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

He looked a little annoyed, but then he went on, “Well, what no one knows outside of this island is where the information is being stored.”

Ah , I thought, yes, that is a big deal.

“It’s in everything, ” he said, his eyes wide with wonder.

“It’s in … everything?”

“Everything alive. Before the Carls even changed our minds, they changed our world. They transformed every living cell on the planet into a tiny computer capable of storing a tiny amount of data and, more importantly, capable of transmitting data extremely rapidly. It’s like every tree has a trillion Wi-Fi routers in it. It’s mind-numbing. It’s terrifying. When the Carls left, they took the Dream, but they left their computer.

“Miranda, I’ll be honest with you, we don’t completely understand how it works. But their system reads information from people’s minds and moves it into other people’s minds. We didn’t have to build it; we just had to figure out how to use it. That’s what’s happening in Aletha’s mind right now. We activate the areas of Aletha’s brain that the Carls created to allow information to be transferred out of her mind and into their network. And then we send signals to your mind that call the information out for you to experience. Figuring out how exactly to do that was not easy, but we found a way.”

It didn’t escape my notice that Peter hadn’t told me exactly what that way was.

“So that’s how the Altus Space works?”

“And there’s more. We have commercialized this system.” He gestured to Aletha’s head. “Soon, anyone in the world will be able to create experiences for the Altus Space and sell them in an open market. We are going to make a lot of skilled and talented people very wealthy.”

If that was true, it was huge. It meant Altus could outsource content creation. They could be the YouTube of full-immersion VR. Someone could strap a rig to their head and go skiing or take a math test or have sex and sell that moment of their lives to anyone with a headset. And, I’m sure, the only currency you could use would be AltaCoin. I didn’t know a lot about business, but I knew when I heard an idea that could easily take over the whole entire world.

“So, I mean, not that I’m complaining, but why are you telling me any of this?”

“Because you’re leveling up, Miranda. This is your job now. You’re going to work in here. You’re going to be like Aletha, one of our clients, but you will be building sandboxes for Altus users.”

I am not bragging when I say that this sounded like a tremendous under-utilization of my skills. I had not been hired to make digital environments, I was a research scientist! Was this a punishment?

“Thank you, Aletha,” Peter said, and then he took me out of the room.

“OK, Miranda, one more thing to see!”

We walked down another ten meters of that long, chill hallway, and then, at the end, Peter opened a door. Light poured through it and I staggered back, not understanding what I was seeing. The room was huge and bright, maybe fifty meters on a side, and it was completely packed with hundreds of hospital beds. It looked like an emergency field hospital for a war or a pandemic. A few people were wandering around, their eyes staring straight ahead, ignoring us, maybe headed to the bathroom or to a lunch break, but most were lying in the beds with headsets strapped to their faces. They all looked local—dark hair and brown skin. Every one of them was wearing an Altus headset. Everyone had a bundle of wires snaking off from them into the floor.

“What …” I said.

“This is the server farm,” Peter said proudly.

I turned to him. He was not smiling, but his eyes had a terrifying glint of pride in them.

“What?” I said.

“AltaCoin is the world’s first cryptocurrency mined by the human mind. More efficient, and more available. Everyone will be able to be a part of this economy.”

Everyone who can afford a headset , I thought.

“Soon, we will make it so that everyone can mine in their sleep, but before then, we had to create an initial supply. So that’s what the server room is for.”

“But these are people,” I said, and the question was there for him to answer.

“Yes, employees. They are being taken care of. They are working for Altus.”

“Why haven’t I ever seen any of them around, though?” I asked, trying to make him see the same thing I was seeing.

“They live here.”

“Where?” I asked, wondering where we could possibly have a dorm that could house all of these people.

“Here,” Peter said.

It took a few moments to realize that when Peter Petrawicki said that they lived here, he meant … this room. They lived in those beds. I didn’t respond. Why was he showing me this? I didn’t know if it was illegal, but it was definitely indefensible. It was the kind of thing that you should not tell someone who you do not trust.

“I know what you’re thinking, Miranda. I know that this looks immoral to you. But you can’t change the world from the kiddie pool. Altus isn’t going to be a company; it’s going to be its own nation, its own world. We are going to give people what they have lost, what they need. For decades, humanity has had nowhere to expand to, but now we’re giving people a new horizon, a new frontier.”

That all sounded pretty gross, and I didn’t know what to say. Then he spoke again, and my stomach dropped through the floor.

“I’ve taken the liberty of having someone pack up your old quarters. Everyone who works in high security lives here. Let me show you to your new room.”

I let out a shaky breath, trying to control my panic, but we both knew the score. If someone had packed up my whole room, they knew about the phone; they had probably even seen my texts. I hadn’t been brought to this new place to work. I had been brought here to be held prisoner.

APRIL

When we walked out of the auditorium, hauling the first round of bags behind us, Maya and I were a little surprised to find that Derek’s pickup truck was gone and in its place was a white moving truck with its rear door lifted and nothing in the back except for a large wooden crate strapped to one wall. Apparently we had arrived on a Friday night, and now we were leaving late Sunday. It felt like it had been much longer. Carl crawled up on my shoulder to watch with me as two people, a man and a woman, stepped out of the van. I knew their faces, but it was dark and the context was off. Then again, my brain could do things now that it couldn’t do before, and suddenly I had access to all the data I needed.

“Jessica?” I asked, in shock.

“April! Oh my god!” She bent over and put her head between her legs for a moment and then continued, “I didn’t believe it was true, but it’s true!”

“What the hell is going on?” Maya said quietly, toward me and Carl.

“We were told that we needed to come up here and get you, so we just … did,” the man said.

“And Mitty!”

“I can’t believe you remember my name,” he said, laughing.

“It was a big day, but also, like, since …” I gestured at my face, though neither of them had made any sign that they’d noticed it. “I’ve been able to remember more or less everything that’s ever happened to me.”

This was something I was just figuring out, but yes.

“Can someone explain what’s going on?” Maya said, looking at Carl. But Carl was being quiet around Jessica and Mitty.

“We each got a book, a few months ago,” Jessica said. She still had the small fighter’s frame and the bright red lipstick. “It was a very smart book, and it had a lot of good ideas that have helped us a lot. With money, but also with some family stuff.”