by Hank Green
3. You will be introduced by your expertise, and no other information will be shared about you. If you share personal information about yourself, you will be banned.
4. All members are vetted by me.
5. I make all final decisions regarding content, membership, banning, and strategy.
6. We go by numbers, not names. I am One because I started and fund The Thread. You, if you joined, would be Twelve.
7. We assess membership rates based on net worth. If you have a net worth under the national average, we pay you $50,000 per year. If your net worth is over the national average, you pay us $1 for every $100 above the national average. So if your net worth is $1,000,000, that’s $850,000 more than the national average. So you would pay us $8,500 per year.
We have a great deal more work to do, and I think you would be an extremely valuable addition to our team, but I understand if you aren’t interested.
Thank you for your kind words,
One
Well, that was something. The fact that something so secretive could be a group of people was really counterintuitive. Eleven people all sharing the responsibility? That was intense, but it made a lot of sense as well. The videos were just too good for one person to make, there had to be a budget. But it was the “most powerful individuals in the world” line that really got my heart thumping.
If I really wanted to make a difference in ways I felt my identity wouldn’t allow, this was it! There was a problem, though. If we were really going to go off my new net worth, which was now up over $100 million, it was a lot to ask. I figured the best policy was honesty, so I replied.
One,
Thank you for your quick response. I am fascinated by this. I have two questions.
1. How do you know that I won’t share this information?
2. My net worth has recently increased dramatically, and the amount I would pay you under your scheme would be over a million dollars. I don’t know how to pay someone that much money. And also, it feels wrong to spend so much money to be part of something even this cool.
I also need to weigh my existing obligations. But overall it just seems like a lot of money. Does it make sense for me to pay that much?
Andy
The response was almost immediate.
Andy,
1. I don’t think you would share the information because you aren’t a dick.
2. Membership rates are nonnegotiable. I’ll work with you on transferring the money if you wish to join.
Thank you,
One
Well, I guess that was that, then. I wasn’t going to transfer a million bucks to an anonymous rando, even if he was a very cool anonymous rando, without a lot of thought, so I decided to do something that the book had told me to do.
I’d been putting it off since even before the book, actually.
* * *
—
I think that tragedy either brings people together or drives them apart. You can find either comfort or a constant reminder. April had always been the reason Maya and I were friends, and so once she was gone, we floated apart immediately. Calling her kinda scared me. I thought maybe she didn’t care that much about me, or maybe she thought that I didn’t care that much about her. But I had been thinking about her, so was glad the book made me pick up the phone.
“What have you been up to?” I asked after the main pleasantries were done.
“I still spend a lot of time on the Som.” It was an answer, but it seemed intentionally vague. Like answering the question in a way that also changed the subject. She was always good at that. I let her be good at it this time.
“Do they talk at all about The Thread?” I asked her, since it was on my mind and also the Som was good at teasing out secrets.
“Ohhh, yeah. Very yeah. Some people think it’s April, but that’s bullshit. The Thread is way too smart to be April.”
I laughed. Every corner of the internet had a different theory about who The Thread was. I had gone Occam’s razor and assumed that it was just one person, but now I knew it really was a conspiracy! It made sense that the Som was mixing Thread conspiracies with April conspiracies. The Som was conspiracy central.
“Sorry, did that sound mean?” she asked.
“No, I was laughing because it’s true and also because it’s a completely ludicrous idea that The Thread is April.”
“Yeah,” she said. I wasn’t sure what to say, but then she continued. “I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch, Andy. I’m still really sad.”
I almost hung up the phone because I knew I was going to start crying. It took a huge amount of willpower to just stay on the phone and let her hear me lose it a bit.
“It’s OK, Andy. I know it’s hard,” she said. She wasn’t crying, which made me feel like I was being weak.
“I don’t think she’s dead,” I blurted out.
“Finally,” Maya replied matter-of-factly. She had seemed depressed to me in recent group chats, but now she seemed solid and confident, if anxious.
“What?”
“I mean, of course she’s not dead. People are just moving on because that’s the logical thing to do. What else can you do? But she’s not dead. I’ve been saying it the whole time and everyone just looks at me with pity. I don’t know what she is, Andy, but she’s not dead.”
“Will we find her?” I asked. She seemed so certain that April was alive. I had gotten jolts of that hope from the book, but I wanted more of it.
There was tension in Maya’s voice when she responded, and it felt like she was answering a different question than the one I was asking: “Wherever she is, I know that I’ll never forgive myself. I might not ever forgive her. She was an idiot and she ruined everything.”
“Jeez, Maya.”
“I’m just saying it out loud. We’ve all thought it. What would you say to her if you had the chance?”
“Oh god, I don’t know. ‘Where have you been? What are the Carls?’”
“That’s what you’d ask her . . . What do you want to tell her?”
“Oh, that I’m sorry and I love her and we need her back and the world is falling apart without her and that she was an idiot a bunch of times, but that doesn’t means she’s a bad person,” I said.
“That’s good,” she said, quietly now, calming down.
Why had I been so afraid of this conversation? Was it that I didn’t want to talk about April? Or was it that I was afraid Maya and I didn’t make sense as friends without her? Maybe both, but both of those fears were misplaced. We shared something hard and pure: We both had lost our best friend. First we lost her to fame, and then we lost her for real.
“Anything else interesting going on?” I changed the topic.
“Oh, well, yes. I don’t really know how to explain it. Have you heard anything about Fish?”
“Fish?” I said.
“It’s a reality game, except you don’t have to pay and the reward for winning is apparently better than infinite orgasms.”
“I have heard nothing about it,” I said.
“Well, if you hear anything, let me know. I think it might have something to do with Peter Petrawicki’s Altus thing. Or maybe with the Carls. It seems weird. Like Carl weird.”
“Oh, did you hear about Miranda?”
“I heard she was trying to get a job with Altus. I told her it sounded reckless, but I didn’t try to stop her.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much the conversation I had with her too,” I lied. “I hope she doesn’t do anything dumb.”
“She’s smarter than all of us combined.”
“Smart people do lots of dumb things.”
* * *
—
The book was right. I needed to talk to Maya. We talked about how I was thinking about communities and that I was taking a break from being cons
tantly present on social media, but that I still thought it was extremely important for me to keep an eye on my feeds. She told me about her parents, and she gave me an update on April’s family, who I hadn’t kept in touch with at all.
I felt so much better afterward. This is going to sound silly, but I felt more real. It felt more like the last year of my life really did happen, and that the life I was leading really was a life—not some bizarre game I was playing, but a way to live. My way to live.
At one point she said to me something I’ll never forget: “If someone had told me that Andy Skampt would become a thoughtful and respected leader two years ago, I would not have believed them. But having watched it happen, it actually makes a lot of sense.”
There was nothing she could have said that would make me happier, and there was no one in the world I would have rather heard it from.
Maybe I didn’t need to join The Thread to feel important.
But then again, of course I did.
MIRANDA
I had given up on hearing back from Altus and was settling back into a routine. Every weekday morning I walked from my marvelously overpriced downtown Berkeley apartment to the lab. Every afternoon I walked back home. And every evening I went for a run.
I think I ran for distraction as much as anything. The rhythm of feet pounding and heart beating and breath flowing in and out. It’s as close as I can get to making my mind turn off.
At the lab, I was going through the motions with the Toms, pushing atoms around and simulating nerve clusters and occasionally running fruitless tests on Maya’s weird rock thingy. And while my simulations ran, or I waited for data to crunch, I would scroll through Twitter. Sometimes I scrolled through normal Twitter, but I also had a bad habit of going back in time. I’d just do an advanced search for April’s tweets from the current week a year ago and read through, remembering how exciting that period was. It all seemed so silly and trivial then. I wanted it back. I remember specifically that that’s what I was doing when an unknown number popped up on my screen.
“Hello?”
“Miranda, this is Dr. Everett Sealy from Altus, we spoke a couple weeks ago on a video conference.” He seemed confident and comfortable, like he’d made similar calls a thousand times.
“Yes! Hello, I’ve been excited to hear from you.” My armpits were immediately sweaty.
“We were wondering if we could have one final interview with you on-site.”
“On-site?”
“Yes, here in Puerto Rico. We’d fly you out.”
“So, I’d come out, talk to you in person, and then fly back and then wait to hear if I got the job?”
“It’s not that big of a deal. No passport required even.”
By this point in the conversation I had already looked up flights to San Juan, which were around ten hours nonstop, and said, “I don’t actually know where you are in Puerto Rico.”
“That’s a little complicated, but you don’t have to worry about travel, that’s all been handled. If you’re interested in continuing the conversation, we’d like you to fly out tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” I said immediately, without thinking.
“I know that’s sudden, but we only have two speeds here, complete standstill and extremely fast. We have a flight booked for you from SFO to Miami, we’ll pick you up there.”
“You’ll pick me up?”
“Yes, our campus isn’t close to the San Juan airport, so we’ve chartered a flight for you from Miami. A few other recruits will be joining you. We’ll email you the details as soon as you confirm.”
“What if I’m not able to get away from work?”
“Your work . . .” he said, “is not so important that you should miss this.”
I didn’t say anything to that, and eventually he continued. “So, I’ll see you tomorrow?”
I swallowed. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
* * *
—
My first stop after the call was Dr. Lundgren’s office.
“They want me to fly to Puerto Rico tomorrow.”
“Good god, of course they do. Jesus, textbook asshole. I’ve been recruited before, and it’s either done honestly and thoughtfully, or it’s done like a magic trick. This is the magic-trick kind. They’re starting by knocking you off balance, they’ll continue by impressing the shit out of you. Then they’ll send you back home without any real information to wait for their shitty offer.”
“Do you think I’ll find out anything useful there?”
“In an interview? No. It’ll all be standard. They’re looking for competence and communication and ‘cultural fit.’” If you can ever get yourself a no-nonsense mentor like Dr. Lundgren, NEVER LET THEM GO.
“Ugh, I get the feeling that I’m not going to have the best vibe with these people.”
“No, but you get what they’re about, and you can fake it.” She had a glint in her eye I’d never seen before. “And, Miranda, they’ll take your phone from you the moment you arrive. They’re not idiots. Go get a prepaid cell phone and text me the number, just in case you want to take quick photos or ask me questions. You don’t want to be completely isolated.”
* * *
—
In Miami, I was shuffled away from the main airport by a man holding a sign that read “Beckwith.” We took his car to a separate tiny airport that was somehow hiding just outside the big airport. It had free coffee and cookies and big TVs and comfy leather armchairs. There were no gates, just a pair of sliding glass doors that opened onto the tarmac.
I dragged my roller bag over the tiled floor, looking at the handful of other people lounging around the airport. There was a family with two young children, a couple pilots sharing a coffee, a couple guys in business suits, and two guys in their late twenties watching cable news and chatting. I felt like it wasn’t impossible that they were also headed to Altus, so I walked toward them.
And then Dr. Everett Sealy’s bald head came around a corner. He locked eyes with me, and his face cracked into a smile.
“We’re all here!” he declared. “Miranda, this is Sid”—he gestured to a well-built, handsome East Asian guy—“and this is Paxton”—he nodded toward a kinda scrawny white guy, his brown hair poking out from under a gray knitted beanie. We all shook hands, and Dr. Sealy, who looked like he’d just received a Christmas present, continued, “No need to waste any more time, let’s get going!”
The pilots who had been sitting with their coffee then stood up, smiling, and introduced themselves to me, having apparently already met the rest of the crowd. One of the pilots said, “If you want to use the restroom, now is a good time. There’s a head on the plane, but it’s a bit awkward in there.”
So there was some toilet time, which I also used to freshen my face a bit, and then we walked through the doors and up to a private jet.
A. Private. Jet.
I kept waiting to go through security, but apparently that isn’t a thing if you own the plane. I took a moment to watch Sid and Paxton’s reactions, which were both suitably wide-eyed. Likewise, I watched Dr. Sealy watch them, his head gleaming in the sun. He looked genuinely happy to be giving some young people a cool and unique experience, though that could easily have been because he was excited to see his plan to impress us was working.
In the end, private planes are like planes but smaller. There was more leg room, and there were unlimited snacks. Two of the seats faced forward and two faced back, so we were all looking at each other the whole flight. That made it so we pretty much had to chat. Luckily, Dr. Sealy was good at keeping everything from getting awkward.
First he got us to open up about what we did for work. Knit-hat-wearing Paxton worked on machine learning algorithms. Well-built Sid had been working for a software company doing design and what they called “UX” or “user experience.” Basically, he figured out what the softw
are would actually look like and how best to guide the user around inside of it.
I was definitely the youngest person in the plane.
“So,” Dr. Sealy said after I’d finished explaining my research, “what do you all think Altus is up to?”
“I didn’t think you’d want us speculating in front of each other,” I said, surprising myself a little.
“Not at all! Obviously you’ve all been thinking about it. And here’s a secret. If you give smart people a bunch of ingredients, different people will come up with different ideas. Each of those ideas probably has merit, and none of them will be the exact thing you’re doing. But it might still be really valuable. So, what do you think?”
Sid chimed in first. “We all know it’s some kind of brain-machine interface, right?” Paxton and I nodded. “The usefulness of a robust connection of inputs and outputs is limitless, right? What’s the focus? I don’t know, I don’t think there has to be a focus. Though it is very curious that so many computer scientists seem to be involved. That makes me think that the bandwidth of the connection is high, and that there may be a novel use beyond the obvious.”
“The obvious being,” I said, “treating disease?”
“That first, yes, but also possibly recreation. People want the Dream back. Maybe we could give it to them.”
Dr. Sealy’s eyes widened at this, but he just said, “Paxton?”
He stared into the distance for a moment and then said, with his warm Alabama accent, “Actually, my first thoughts were in the opposite direction.”
“What do you mean by that?” Dr. Sealy asked. Sid and I leaned in to listen.
“Well, the obvious thing is that the machines are somehow helping the brain. But with so many computer scientists and the disciplines you’re looking at—it made me wonder if possibly the goal was to have brains help machines.”
Somehow, in the rumbling cabin of that airplane, I got a set of goose bumps all the way down to my toes. That was an idea.