Хэнк Грин - A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“Peter,” I said, and I reached out and grabbed his hand, smiling. Normal, normal, normal!

“Do you want to go have a chat? I’m sorry if you caught us a little off guard. It is the middle of the night.”

“Yeah, that’s my bad,” I said, sounding cool, but feeling very small, very alone, and completely terrified. “It just seemed suddenly urgent that I come visit you,” I said.

“Well, let’s get to a conference room and we can talk about it. But first, I hope you don’t mind, we’re all about secrecy here, can you hand Davis your phone?” He gestured to the biggest of his companions. They had clearly all hastily dressed, but nonetheless each had a jacket on that could very easily be concealing a gun. I handed my phone to Davis, thinking that this plan was terrible and that I hated everything about it.

As he led me out of the hangar and through a courtyard toward a large building, Peter Petrawicki did what he did best.

“April, when I heard you had come back, I was …” He paused for dramatic effect. “I was just so relieved. The part I played in your story was not a kind one, and you owe me nothing. But I hope that you know I never wanted anything like that”—and then he turned to me, gesturing vaguely at my body, small and overshadowed by the bulk of him and his companions—“like this to happen to you.”

We walked past a huge cinder block building with no windows. That, I knew, was where Miranda was being kept, and the thought of her made me stronger. It made it clear that this guy’s talk was nothing more than the most distilled bullshit on the planet. That didn’t stop him from spewing it, though.

“I felt deeply responsible for what happened to you. I still do. What a foolish campaign I was on. I was chasing the high, that was all. Now, what we’re doing here”—he gestured around at the giant, curving building we were approaching—“is real change. You can’t change the world on cable news. You actually have to do something. And we’re doing something amazing.”

I was starting to realize that he was just giving me a modified version of a speech he’d given dozens of times before, possibly to every new high-level recruit that landed on the island. He opened the door for me, and as I walked through it, I felt the fear biting at the back of my throat as I said, “Yeah, and all you needed to do it was sell yourself to the space aliens that you got famous by despising.”

I saw a flash of anger in his eyes, but it was gone just as fast.

He didn’t say anything more until we were alone in the conference room.

“What do you know?”

All of the bullshit had suddenly been washed away. I realized that the flash I’d seen in his eyes wasn’t anger; it was fear. He was afraid I knew something, but what? And it came to me. When I’d said that he sold out to the aliens, I meant that he’d been using the changes in our brains Carl created to make Altus work. But it was more than that.

“How long have you been working for him?”

“For who?” He sounded completely confident in his denial.

“You didn’t do this. You never could have. Maybe you’re able to pretend that some benevolent scientist is feeding you all of these systems to make Altus work. I’m sure you’ve had to do a ton of work to make it look like you’re doing work, but you have to know who actually did it.”

“We have some of the best minds in the world at Altus. We’re not just messing about. We built this.”

“OK, sure, except I saw your eyes.” I stood up from the table. “You know who you really work for. You’re just being moved around on the board like the rest of us. Just like Carl found me and made me their game piece, something else found you. I don’t care about you, you’re just the human face.”

And then I kept talking as I worked things out.

“Actually, y’know what, I do care. I just hate that I care. I care that you would say whatever it took to get on TV because that means you didn’t hurt me and the world for something you actually believed, you only believed it because it would get you attention.” He opened his mouth to talk, but I just kept going, leaning over the table toward him. “I guess maybe that was true of me too, so maybe that’s why I hate you so much, because you and I are the same thing. I think I’m better, but who knows, maybe I’m not. Maybe you really have convinced yourself that you’re some Alexander the Great, ushering in change, and the role you play is actually important. But that’s always been a lie. There are no great men, only moments when power is unleashed, and then dicks like you turn theft and murder from taboos into tools. Really you’re just falling into the well of your own power. And for you, it isn’t even your power because you have no control anymore, you’re just a variable to be manipulated, and you beg for it. You’ll beg to be a pawn as long as you get to look like the king.”

“Well,” Peter said, trying to sound calm even though his face was flushed and he was gripping his hands to keep them from shaking, “now that you’re done with your little outburst, why don’t you tell me why you’re here.”

I almost killed him. I don’t mean I wanted to kill him. I mean … that comment made me so mad that I almost smacked him as hard as I could, which, with my new body, would probably have divided his head in half. Luckily for us both, I stopped myself.

“I’m worried about Miranda,” I said instead.

“Well, I think you’ll see her very soon. In fact, I imagine the two of you will be spending a lot of time together.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. And then I realized this wasn’t part of the plan. I needed to stall him longer.

“I mean, what we are doing here is too important for anyone like you to stand in the way of it. You live a reclusive life now, and it seems that your pilots didn’t even file a flight plan. You say I turn theft and murder into tools, but they always have been.” His tone wasn’t scary because he sounded evil. He sounded sad, like he didn’t want to have to kill me, and that was more terrifying than any malice.

“I imagine it will be a fairly long time before anyone even notices you’re gone. By then, it’ll be too late. Altus doesn’t exist in any country, the government of Val Verde is … very cooperative. Who is going to stop us?”

But then, as he talked, I felt my mind suddenly grab ahold of the thing it had lost. It was like I had been locked into place on a roller coaster, but the car was free again. Carl had brought down whatever was blocking our ability to connect to Altus.

“I just love this,” I said.

“What?” Peter replied, looking unsettled. And then his look of concern deepened as the overhead speaker in the conference room started playing a creepy electric organ sustaining a minor chord.

“How massively you underestimated us,” I said. “You actually thought I came alone. You really thought I would make the same mistake again.”

The music crescendoed, and then static broke through and the organ dissolved into digital tones and distortion.

“I love it. So. God. Damn. Much.”

Peter called out to his muscle in the hall, “Get in here!”

They came into the room, and then I surrendered my body to Carl.

Three drum hits came crashing through the overhead speakers. On the first beat my fist slammed into one of the guard’s ribs. I ducked under his counter on the second beat, and on the third my legs straightened as my left fist reached high and fast into his jaw. I watched from inside my body as his head snapped back fast enough that I worried he might be seriously hurt. But it wasn’t something I had done, just something I had watched myself do.

Carl had spent time in my body; they had gotten to know it as they were repairing me. And now the full force of their processing power was dedicated to moving my body through space. I wanted to watch as the man slumped to the ground, but my eyes flicked instead to the two men who were rushing me from outside the room. Before I knew what was happening, I had flattened myself to the floor. One man missed me completely and crashed into the window behind me. I heard the safety glass tinkling down in a waterfall around him. The other guy had stumbled to a stop before me, but Carl’s foreign strength coursed through me and I rocketed myself off the floor, my head connecting with the man’s body, just at the base of his sternum. I felt it crack. He stumbled backward, gasping for breath. It was the man who had taken my phone. I stepped inside his guard and, like a trained thief, darted my hand into and out of his inside suit coat pocket. I found myself holding my phone as my leg swept under him. His feet went up and his head went down, knocking solidly into the hard carpeted floor. The music was so loud I couldn’t hear any of their grunts or groans.