Хэнк Грин - A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

I walked around the four-bedroom apartment, ogling the views. It was fully furnished. The dining room table probably cost more than some American homes. Josh Crane had very good taste in art, or at least very expensive taste in art, so I was treating the place like a gallery when the elevator ding sent my heart into my throat. I wanted to run away, to hide, but this was what the book had said would happen, so instead I walked back to the landing.

There were two people, a man and a woman, and they were pushing … well, a beautiful, massive birthday cake. It was four feet high, with pastel frosting. Or at least, it was made to look like frosting. I was fairly sure that it wasn’t a real cake.

It was on casters, and it rolled smoothly along the gray-stained hardwood floor.

“Um …” I said. “Do I have to sign, or …”

“No,” the woman said with a big smile. “We have to go now.” It was only then that I thought for a moment I might recognize them.

Once the elevator door was closed, with my heart thumping in my teeth, I walked forward toward the cake. Slowly, deliberately, the top of the cake hinged backward, and April May slowly uncurled to standing. My body almost stopped working. Her hair looked lank and dirty. Her skin—at least the part that definitely was skin—was pale and drawn. Her eyes, though, were bright, and she smiled like she was seeing something she needed to see.

“Ta-daaaaa,” she said apologetically.

A laugh and a sob simultaneously exploded out of me, and then I fell to my knees and put my head on the ground, not sure if I would be able to stay conscious. I heard an unfamiliar noise coming out of my mouth, just a long low groan. She was there next to me then, wrapping her arms around me. I looked up and saw April’s face—it was divided in two. My mind couldn’t make sense of it. And then Maya was there too. Had she been in the cake? And then there was a monkey, and then my vision blurred and I heard a rushing noise in my ears. I put my head down just in time to pass out.

I woke up in a very fancy bed and turned to look out the window. I was, somehow, looking down on the Clock Tower Building, a building I had looked up at probably hundreds of times. The different perspective twisted my mind in a loop. I rolled out of bed to take in the view.

I had to pee. I also had to have a whole lot of questions answered. I walked out of the bedroom and into a hallway, which led me to the kitchen and dining area, where Maya was sitting at a table.

“Maya,” I said.

She stood up and ran over to me, grabbing me tight and holding on. “What is going on?” I asked.

“A lot. I don’t know where to start.”

“Is April—”

“She’s fine,” she interrupted, saving me from finishing the sentence. “She’s … a little different, but I think anyone would be. Her new skin … it’s just that, a prosthetic, because of the fire. It covers a lot of her body.”

That made me wonder if they were back together. Had Maya seen April’s whole body? She saw me wondering that and punched me in the arm. “Jesus. No, we’re not back together. I need to hear some words I haven’t heard yet. I honestly don’t know where she is on a lot of things. There hasn’t been enough time.”

“Where is she?” I asked.

“She went to take a shower. We’ve been on the run and haven’t had a chance to get clean in a while.”

And then a weight slammed into me from behind.

“AGGGUHHH,” I said, looking down to see April’s arms, one her normal color, the other stony and white with iridescent flecks in it. I could feel the wetness of her hair on the back of my neck.

“OK!” I said when the squeeze actually started to hurt. She let go and then came around to stand in front of me. She was wearing a thick, white, too-big bathrobe. I looked down at her, and she moved in again for a more proper hug. I tucked her head under my chin, and it fit perfectly, her wet, shiny black hair interlacing with the week’s worth of stubble on my chin and neck. Under the robe, I felt the reality of her body, soft and solid. My eyes were stinging with tears.

I looked down at her. From her hairline, around her nose, and down through her jaw, the left half of her face shone like an oyster shell. I said the first thing that came to my mind.

“Shit, that looks badass.”

She punched me in the shoulder, which actually hurt a little.

“I’ve heard you’ve been busy,” she said, and her voice was 100 percent April.

I thought about that for a second and then said, “You planted a lot of seeds, I’ve had some gardening to do.”

“Jesus, Andy,” she retorted immediately, “you do sound like a pastor. I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”

I suddenly was. “I was told to bring food,” I said. “It’s in one of the two massive refrigerators.” I gestured over my shoulder.

“It is really good to see you.” As she said it, we all heard the elevator softly ping in the other room. April and Maya looked at each other, eyes wide and brows knitted. “Is someone else supposed to be coming?” Maya said.

When no one replied, she pulled a knife out of the knife block and then went and hid behind the kitchen island. I didn’t know what to do, so I joined her until I heard a voice say, “Holy s’moly.”

It was Robin. I stood up and saw April holding him. His arms were wrapped around her. In his right hand he held a small leather-bound book.

I know I’m not the first one to mention this, but I feel like I need to reemphasize that it is really weird to talk to a monkey and really weird to talk to a space alien computer program, but it’s, like, unsustainably weird to talk to both at the same time. But then, like everything, somehow you just get used to it.

I didn’t want to let April out of my sight. It seemed like this new reality could pass into a dream with any shift in the wind. In that way, it felt a lot like what it was like when April was suddenly gone. Adjusting to a new reality just takes time, and your mind keeps looking for signs that the old reality was the real one.

My brain was having an easier time with the talking monkey than it was with April being alive. It had happened! Everything since that “Knock Knock” had led me to this. I had done everything right.

But as pleased as I was with my actions, I found myself dancing around my obsession with Altus. I knew I was doing the right thing by trying to get more information about how it worked, but also I didn’t feel like explaining to April that I was well on my way to being one of the first people in the world to get access to some deluxe experience championed by Peter Petrawicki.

“Why do you think Altus is keeping the Space so exclusive?” April asked me.

“What do you mean?”

“Why aren’t they giving it to everyone? What’s the cost to them?”

“Well, I don’t know. It must cost money to run, so maybe they need to sell access. They’ve built a massive office in Val Verde, and they took a lot of investment from extremely rich people that want their investment back, I guess,” I answered.

“Neither of you are correct,” Carl spoke, for the first time in a while, through their smartwatch.

“Yeah, I don’t love agreeing with the monkey, but you’re both not getting the point,” Maya added.

“Your system is fueled by the creation and capture of value,” Carl said. “The goal is to capture as much value as you create, though in practice that is more or less impossible. Altus is creating false scarcity because they think that is the best way to capture the value they are creating—there’s no more to it than that. They’re just following the incentives of the system.”

“But isn’t the point to create value?” April asked the monkey.