Хэнк Грин - A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“Can one of you two just explain what is going on right now?” I said, getting scared.

“Carl,” she said carefully, “if you are so good at predicting things surrounding me and April, you must have known that someone was coming to that cabin in Vermont.”

“I did.”

“And if you can confound your brother’s predictions, why didn’t you do it then?”

“Because I didn’t want to.”

My heart dropped through the floor. What? I thought maybe I had heard that wrong. I turned to them, “Explain yourself right now.”

The monkey looked back at me, their little face stony. “You needed to know the extent of the danger. I did not know what my brother would do, but I knew he would send someone after you. I had to wait until the threat was clear. It was a dangerous risk, but there was no better way.”

“You could have just hidden us, though.” I stood up from the couch and turned to look at them. Carl followed suit, standing up on the couch to take the full force of my emotions.

“I could have protected you, but it would have doomed your system.”

“Fuck. The. System,” I said. “You said it was a risk. You can predict the future—how likely was it that Maya didn’t leave that cabin alive?”

“In roughly 4 percent of simulations, Maya died,” Carl said.

I leaned over Carl, feeling light-headed as embers flicked the inside of my mind. Slowly, I said, “What gives you that right?”

Carl responded immediately, their amber eyes hard but sad. “Only that I have the ability.”

“What?” I had been expecting Carl to defend themself.

“Power is just a lack of constraint.”

I didn’t understand what they were saying. Maybe I was too angry, or maybe it was too abstract. But then I heard Maya’s voice. I had almost forgotten she was there.

“Carl’s right, that’s what power is. It’s just ability and desire without restriction. What restriction does Carl have, aside from their random rules and the laws of physics. They have the power because they have the power. That’s how power has always been.”

“Leave,” I said.

“I can’t,” Carl replied immediately. “I know I have lost your friendship, and I’ve known it would happen for a long time. It hurts, but pain is just part of what it is to be me now. Regardless, I have to go with you to Altus. If I don’t, you will both die.”

Suddenly and irrationally, a rage rose in me fast and bright, maybe a flashback to my emotional hangover, and I thought I might hit them. But what would that achieve? Carl wasn’t the monkey; the monkey was just a body they were in.

“April”—Carl’s voice was maddeningly calm—“I hate the choices I have to make, but I have to make them because I’m the only one who can.”

I looked over to Maya for permission to flip out, but somehow her face showed a kind of acceptance.

“Maya, they almost killed you!” I said, gesturing to the situation, hoping she would give me permission to let my guard down and have a true and terrible tantrum.

“April …” And then she started crying.

I looked down at my hands, one opaque milky glass, and realized what I had been missing. Carl had almost killed me too. What were the odds that I came out of that warehouse alive? Did I? Did this life even count?

It was too much. “I have to go … Maya, we have to go.”

“We all have to go,” Carl said. “We’re going to Altus, now. Go pack.”

“No, that’s not what I mean, I mean I need to get away from you,” I said, staring into their eyes.

“If you go alone, you’ll both die.”

Carl lowered themself from the couch and walked to their room. The door closed softly behind them.

My phone buzzed on the couch. It was Andy.

ANDY

Jason had come into my room and started kicking me. I had been up all night watching the markets plunge and watching my AltaCoin explode.

“What the fuck, dude,” I said once my headset was off, blinking in the light of the day. I had no idea what time it was.

“Fuck you, get up and come with me,” he replied. I hadn’t recorded an episode of Slainspotting in weeks. I hadn’t even consumed a piece of media that wasn’t either inside of Altus or about Altus for weeks. I knew I was letting him down. I knew I wasn’t being healthy, and that he wasn’t sure whether to be more furious or worried, but I was convinced that I needed to know everything about Altus to be the leader I needed to be in the coming revolution, whenever that was going to be. Little did I know it would be tomorrow.

But I knew fighting Jason was no use. His jaw was fixed and his eyes were hard. Also, I needed to go for a walk—my body was aching.

So I got up and followed Jason out of the apartment, down the elevator, and onto our street, which was deserted, and to a coffee shop. We each got an Americano and sat down.

“Look around at the people in here, tell me what you see.”

“There aren’t very many people in here,” I responded.

“It’s 10 a.m. Does that seem strange to you?”

I never knew what time it was anymore, so Jason was right that he had to tell me. The place was usually packed at this time of day. I spent more time looking at each of the people in the coffee shop. “We’re the only guys in here except for the guy in the back, who looks like he’s been hit by a train.”

Jason was silent, but his eyebrows went up in a gesture I interpreted as “And?”

“Oh, is that what I look like?”

“Yeah, that guy is an obvious Altus hound, and so are you. You’ve all got the same look and it isn’t a good one.”

I rubbed my chin, which was past prickly and into hairy. I’d been trying to keep presentable for the TV cameras, but I hadn’t had any interviews in the last few days, and traditional news was feeling more and more irrelevant to me anyway.

“Why is it just women in here?”

“Oh, I dunno … Have you ever noticed how the Altus Space is largely about ‘intellectual debate’ and ‘self-improvement’ and porn? Jesus, dude, you’re supposed to be an expert on this stuff. Have you never noticed who your audience is?”

Of course I had—I’d even seen think pieces talking about how Altus was built by men for men and how it was a weakness of the company—but talking about that wasn’t good for what I was trying to do, so I hadn’t put a lot of thought toward it. I groggily sipped my coffee, feeling the pit opening inside me.

Jason didn’t know the plan. I was only setting myself up to be a leader in the Space so I would be credible when I turned my back on it. And I’d do that as soon as it was the right time. Except that “the right time” seemed further away every day. And every day I felt a little more like the Space was the next step forward in human consciousness. Yeah, sure, I looked sallow and unkempt. And yes, Altus was being run the wrong way, but still, it was so powerful. And I was a part of that, a part of something so big it was crashing the world economy and making me disgustingly rich.

Even while I sat there with Jason, my mind wanted to go grab my headset. I didn’t even know what I would do once I was there. I just wanted it.

The Space actually could make humanity better—of that I had no doubt. The way it was being run … Jason was right. It was mostly a bunch of dudes making stuff that mostly appealed to a bunch of dudes. And Altus had set it up so that they would be making money from every angle possible.

Everyone who had access was taking their first crack at a sandbox or an experience and spending all of the rest of their time mining AltaCoin so they could buy more.

Altus was now worth hundreds of billions of dollars. But that day there was a 20 percent stock market drop, trillions of dollars of value lost—if no one wanted or needed to buy things, if all of the best human experiences were inside the Altus Space … what was the economy even for?