Хэнк Грин - A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“That is unclear.” They scratched the back of their little head. “Creating the value is what people publicly praise, but capturing value is what is actually rewarded. Altus is creating value, likely far more than it is capturing, at least right now. But your system does not have good ways of even recognizing the existence of value that is created but not captured.”

We all looked at Maya.

“Yeah,” she said, “that.”

We had all finished snacking by then, so we moved to the giant living room. Robin and I couldn’t stop looking down at the precipitous views of the city.

I plopped onto the couch. It was a beautiful cool, soft, mottled-gray leather, but somehow not particularly comfortable. And that’s where I was sitting when we went all the way down the rabbit hole.

“The situation we’re in, if you’ll allow me to summarize”—April gestured at the monkey, and they dipped their head forward—“is that an advanced intelligence determined that we will very likely destroy ourselves sometime in the next couple hundred years and sent an envoy to attempt to set us on a better path. That failed, and so now that envoy has been replaced by another … I dunno what to call it … entity, I guess, that is going to, instead of nudging us into a better course, control every individual human’s decisions. We don’t know how that entity is going to do it, but we do know that it probably has something to do with Altus …” The monkey raised their hand here, and April paused.

“It may be that Altus is part of the intervention—I can’t know—but I do know that Altus’s existence makes it extremely likely that you will eventually destroy yourselves without intervention.”

“How?” I asked, getting a little nervous about what I’d already been hiding from Maya and April.

“It is not simple. You will create simple narratives as it happens, but they will all be incorrect. The largest affecting factors will be tremendous concentration of power in the hands of fewer and fewer people, who will then destabilize the world to protect that power, large-scale isolation caused by easy alternatives to community and society, and a change in the speed of transfer of information that will be too rapid for norms and taboos to prevent it from being used maliciously.”

“That sounds … familiar,” Maya said.

The monkey seemed to smirk. “All of this will make you less able to handle unlikely but ultimately inevitable catastrophes. Especially if they compound. A war on top of an unstable climate on top of a pandemic, for example.”

“Why are you telling us this?” I asked.

“Because if my brother has his way with you, it will be a catastrophic loss for the galaxy.”

Robin’s eyes widened and he said, “Your … brother?”

“Yes, we are siblings.”

“Shouldn’t your”—I had to think about what I was going to say—“your loyalty be to your own people?”

“You are my people. I don’t know who created me. Based on the data given to me, systems like yours tend to be short-lived. Ultimately, all beauty is transitory, but there’s no choice except to believe it is worthy. I am still doing what I was created to do. Allowing my brother to destroy your beauty would be contrary to my programming.”

I mulled that over for a while, and then April took back over.

“So, we all agree with Carl. Humanity shouldn’t become the beloved pet of a planet-wide conscious infection. But the only way to prevent that is to change the world enough that we probably will not destroy ourselves. And the best way to do that is to make Altus not exist anymore. Andy, how do you feel about that?”

I was caught a little off guard, worried why she thought I was the right person to ask.

“Um …” I didn’t even know what the Premium version had in store, but I was deeply attached. “It will be extremely hard because the people who are using Altus’s service love it a lot. Even if we destroyed their whole system, I think people would rebuild it,” I said, trying to sound like I wasn’t one of those people.

“How would you feel if we destroyed Altus?” Maya asked, seeing deeper into me than I would maybe have liked.

“I’m not sure if we can,” I hedged.

“We must,” said Carl.

And then Maya, April, Robin, and Carl were all looking at me. Every one of them showing me some mix of hope and fear and frustration.

“Andy,” Robin said, his voice strong.

I looked from him to April and saw an anger there I hadn’t expected.

Maya took over, seeing the dangerous ground we were on before I did. “Peter Petrawicki and Altus are not two different things. I understand looking at things from thirty thousand feet or whatever, and understanding the magnitude of the challenge is great, but Altus isn’t salvageable. It’s rotten to the core.”

I finally thought of how my hesitation must look through April’s eyes. To come back and find that her best friend was enthusiastically enjoying a creation of the man who might be most to blame for her murder.

How had I ended up here?

“Of course we will,” I said, fully chastised. “We’ll take it down and I’ll love doing it.”

Relief spread over April’s face, but I caught a hardness in Maya’s eyes.

“What tools do we have?” April asked.

“Well, since we’re sharing secrets, I have a few. I have a large social media following, and a lot of people listen to me. I’m also on track to be one of the first fifty people with access to the Altus Premium Space. I also am one of only a dozen people who collaborate on an anonymous video journalism channel called The Thread that reaches tens of millions of influential people.”

Maya gasped at this. “You’re The Thread?” she said, almost as an accusation.

“No, The Thread isn’t one person. It’s a group of people. I was invited in, and we construct the content together. I have no idea who is in charge—everyone is anonymous. Only one person knows who everyone is, and no one knows who they are.”

“That’s a big fucking deal, Andy,” she said.

“Well, I have one more thing on the list, which is that I have a hundred fifty million dollars.”

Everybody’s eyes got big then.

“What the hell have you been up to? And what is The Thread?” April asked.

“Jesus, all I did was find April,” Maya said.

I looked at Carl, who blinked very slowly and then said, “I gave him some very good investment advice.”

“I FUCKING KNEW IT!” I said. “Can I tell them?”

“Yes,” they said.

“Carl here has been dragging me around by the dick with a secret, all-knowing book.”

“Oh. Yeah, I got a book too,” Maya said.

“Me too,” Robin added, holding his up.

“Fuck! Why were you giving us all books?” I said, staring at the monkey. They looked unfazed.

“You will continue to get them. They are the best way for me to communicate without the possibility of detection,” they said.

“Well, I hope you know it was completely terrifying,” I said. And then, turning back to the topic at hand: “So I have a hundred fifty million dollars, access to The Thread, potentially access to the Altus Premium Space—what do you guys have?”

I had tried to gloss over my status inside of Altus, but I couldn’t lie about it either.

“So you’re going to be one of the first people to really know what Altus is?” April asked.

“Maybe. I hope so.”

She thought about it for a moment and then said, “That’s going to be extremely powerful. Andy, I have to ask you to do something, and it’s going to suck. I want you to go all in on Altus. I want you to be a champion for them. People are going to hate you for it, but you will be our inside man. And when you turn away from them, it will matter because you believed in it.”