Хэнк Грин - A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

3. Helping their students.

4. Being a better teacher this year than they were last year.

5. Being appreciated for their work (god willing).

And I find that it is much easier to believe in your intrinsic value if you are getting all these other signals that you have value.

I spent weeks working all of this out for a reason. I was mad and I wanted to know why, and now it’s really obvious to me. Compared to my former self, I was just much less. I had gone from being a billionaire back to being just merely well-off. April had taken my identity as her surrogate by existing again. The end of The Thread had dramatically diminished my ability to impact the world. And on top of all of that, I had spent months actually trying to help people, only to abandon that brand the moment something shinier came along.

I was so mad, and I was mad that I was mad.

And it didn’t escape my notice that I was the only person being directly manipulated by both Carl and their brother. On The Thread, One was working constantly to get me addicted to Altus and to get me to tie my identity to it. Carl, meanwhile, was betting that I would be able to overcome that temptation. Or, more likely, they were betting that it wouldn’t matter. And it hadn’t. If it were up to me, I probably wouldn’t have let Miranda break Altus, and that fact tore at me every day.

This whole time, I was also dealing with the same Altus withdrawal that millions of people were dealing with, so, basically, life sucked.

And every day it became clearer and clearer that Altus was never coming back, and every day I got angrier and angrier about it. I didn’t know whether to be mad at my friends for destroying it, at Carl for setting me up to fall in love with it, or at myself for being so easy to manipulate into loving something terrible. Over and over again, every night I kept my mouth shut.

But then, finally, a couple of months after Altus shut down, I couldn’t do it anymore.

Andy:I’m mad. I’ve been mad the whole time. I can’t stop.

April:What?

Andy:About Altus. I miss it. It’s gone. I know you did what you had to do, but I’m still mad.

April:I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that, Andy.

This made me even angrier, but maybe it was the right kind of anger. Maybe the fire couldn’t go out until it burned up its fuel.

Andy:Maybe I just need you to know. I thought we were going to get control of Altus … to do good things with it. Not just destroy it. I don’t know why we got to make this decision for so many people.

April:OK, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I’m mad that you’re mad because this is something that I don’t know if I did right. But we had to do something. I wish I had your support. But I guess I understand if I don’t.

I didn’t write back for a while and then, finally, a wall of text appeared.

April:The problem with Altus wasn’t how it was run or who was running it, it was that whoever was running it would instantly be too powerful. If someone had to be that powerful, you’d be close to the top of my list. We’re good people, but I don’t even trust us. Power concentrates naturally, but that concentration is, by itself, a problem. We made a choice for a lot of people, but that choice wasn’t just “You can’t have Altus anymore,” it was “One tiny group of people will not be in charge of the future.” We had to do it for Carl reasons, but even without that it was the right thing. I really believe that. Altus was an invasion. They wanted to be the future, I think that was why they were so dangerous. The most impactful thing you can do with power is almost always to give it away.

I read that paragraph several times before I wrote back.

Andy:Did Maya help you write that? Because it’s really good.

April:Fuck you!

April:And yes.

Andy:I’m going to think about this. Thank you for dealing with me.

April:Literally any time.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s very important to have friends who are smarter than you … and who are also kind to you.

I turned to Bex, who was lying on the bed beside me. “Why didn’t you give up on me?”

“Shut up, Andy,” she said. “Go to sleep.”

MIRANDA

So I saved the world, huh? I mean, not just me, but it’s a little hard to feel like a complete phony when humanity would definitely have been doomed without you. That doesn’t mean that I don’t still sometimes feel like a fraud, but it’s nice to have a solid touchstone.

Also, I get to do really cool stuff now.

I went back to Berkeley, where Professor Lundgren had, once again, kept my lab bench in place and available. And there she and I started doing something pretty dangerous and very secret—we took Altus’s source code and tried to use it to figure out how it worked.

What became clear pretty quickly was that no one at Altus had written the code and, indeed, no human had written it. Much of it was completely indecipherable. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t find anything useful.

We were able to determine that the changes Carl made to our brains to allow us to receive and transmit data into their network were observable and permanent. And we were able to determine that even children born after the Dream stopped happening had those changes. What we were not able to find was any trace of the computational system Carl’s brother was, theoretically, still using to observe us.

We knew it was there, but whatever systems Carl used to turn our biosphere into a planetwide computer were too elegant for us to even perceive. You’d almost think it wasn’t there, which I guess is the point.

We all dropped our Altus nicknames when we got back to Berkeley. And I say “we” because the first people I hired onto my research team (yes, I had a research team now) were Paxton and Sid.

I was trying to get them to go for runs with me, though they were more successful in getting me to play D&D with them.

But I did succeed in getting them to help me do amazing research. We teased out the barest bits of how the Altus Space worked. From that, we got little insights that could potentially help push brain-computer interfaces forward by ten or even fifteen years.

And then, after we were fairly certain that we’d gotten most of the low-hanging fruit from our analysis of the alien code, y’know what we did? We destroyed it. We took every single hard drive that had ever touched that stuff, and we put them in a truck, and we drove that truck to a facility that can smash anything into powder. And then each of us took turns throwing drives into the maw of this giant grinder that was built specifically to destroy hard drives. The drives split and bounced and ripped apart until they finally fell through to the other side, where they were nothing more than jangling pieces of plastic, silicon, and metal. We each took one little piece back to the lab with us, where they sit above our lab stations.

Every day we come in and we do science. We do great science, and I actually feel like the leader of this little team. I feel like I belong to something again. We do it right, and we do it well, and in the morning I come in and I look at my little bent, mangled piece of hard drive and feel something lovely. I feel whatever feeling is the exact opposite of regret.

MAYA

You don’t get to know where April and I went. I’ve had enough of that. We’re just here on planet Earth with the rest of the humans. Did we make a couple of not-super-well-thought-out financial decisions? Yeah, but we had to make a comfortable life for ourselves and Paulette. Paulette is our monkey.