A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

by Hank Green

  “I have rebuilt you. You are ready to be back now,” the speaker said.

  “Are there any clothes?” I asked, feeling a little silly and surprisingly calm. It was just me and the Alexa, but in general, if possible, it’s best to not be completely nude in unfamiliar abandoned dive bars.

  “Under the bed.”

  I looked, and indeed, there was a neatly folded stack of clothes—jeans, a shirt, a hoodie, underwear, and a bra.

  As “Senses Working Overtime” finished and a fucking John Mayer song started up, I yanked the clothes on as fast as I could, trying hard not to look too long at the new and unfamiliar parts of my body. The needs of the bladder can outweigh a lot of weirdness. It was a bar . . . There must be a bathroom. It didn’t take long to find it. Past what was probably once the sound booth for the dance floor, and just before another secondary bar area (which was unlit and creepy), a door opened into a shitty little bathroom. I pulled down my pants and squatted. The paint was peeling. Graffiti announced “For a good time, call your legislator,” and “Go Fuck a Tacos,” and “Accept Jesus”—there was a diversity of opinions among the people who previously peed here.

  I was working very hard not to look down at my left leg, which was beautiful and smooth and not made out of me. The bathroom was stocked with toilet paper, and I was flooded with a surprising sense of relief. At least there I was intact and still all the way human. I was kinda shocked by how much that mattered. I felt strong enough to stand up and look in the mirror.

  * * *

  —

  It took me nearly a decade to become comfortable with my attractiveness. For a long time, I was afraid of it. Or, rather, I was afraid of the attention it brought me, and uncomfortable with the idea that I could have power over someone just because of the way I looked. I realize now that power you can’t control isn’t power at all.

  But after a solid year of becoming a combination social media starlet and political pundit, I had looked at my own face a lot. I had gotten more comfortable with the knowledge that looking good meant more people paid attention to me. I had realized that I needed to use every tool I had, and it was no use ignoring one just because I hadn’t done anything to deserve it. What had I done to deserve any of the advantages I had?

  What I’m trying to say is, I had become a fan of my own face just in time to lose it.

  * * *

  —

  I looked in the mirror, and my strength dissolved. I jerked my gaze down to the sink as my knees went weak. In the glance, I had seen the left side of my face, an inhuman mask from my hairline to my chin. I held the sink in my hands, both for support and just for something to clench my fists against, and then I looked up and kept my eyes on my face.

  My ears were still mine, but my left cheekbone and all of my jaw had been replaced. I tried to find the seam between the new skin and the old. But it blended perfectly. It was not a mask on top of my face; it was my face. This was my face now. I stopped pulling and just looked.

  My right arm, the one that was still made of me, looked strong and toned. Stronger maybe than I remembered it looking.

  My eyes, at least, looked like my eyes. I didn’t have eyelashes on the left side, or an eyebrow. But everything moved like it should. “So this is my face,” I said, both to help myself accept it and to test how my mouth worked with half of it made of the smooth, rippling stone. The inside of my cheek felt slimy and cold against my still-real tongue. But I wasn’t done. I pulled the T-shirt off over my head.

  My body had apparently been burned bad enough that much of my stomach and chest was covered in the stuff, and that included my left breast. The replacement looked like a mannequin boob. It wasn’t just the lack of a nipple that made it feel fake; it was fake. I held both of my breasts in my hands and then my brain just closed down. I stopped being able to feel anything. I pulled on the shirt and walked out of the bathroom.

  The Alexa was playing Rihanna, and a little monkey was waiting outside.

  “Hello, April,” it said, its voice rasping terrifyingly from its throat. “I am Carl.”

  APRIL

  Hello, Carl,” I said, like I was in a dream.

  “We thought it would be best if you went through that alone,” it rasped. The voice was so deeply inhuman that I couldn’t help but take a sharp step backward.

  Then the music dimmed, and the speaker on the bar in the other room boomed, “Sorry again—we can use this voice if that is better.”

  “Jesus Christ, this is really fucked-up, you know?”

  “Yes, we do, we’re sorry. We’ve asked a lot of you.” It was still the speaker in the other room, but I looked straight into the little monkey’s eyes as it talked. Its face was pink, haloed by tawny fur. Its eyes were the color of toffee.

  “I honestly can’t say which voice is creepier.”

  “Yes, we weren’t sure either.” This time the words came tripping inelegantly from the monkey, like a frog that had been punched in the throat, and my face scrunched up again.

  “No, no, that one’s worse. That’s definitely worse. Can I go sit down?” I was feeling weak.

  The monkey ran into the other room and then hopped up onto the bar by the smart speaker.

  I followed and took a seat at the bar. Somehow, this felt more normal. At least sitting at a bar is a normal place to talk to a stranger, even if that stranger is a monkey speaking through an Amazon Echo.

  “May I ask, how you are feeling?” the speaker asked.

  “Why do you keep switching back and forth between ‘we’ and ‘I’?” I asked, trying to deflect.

  “You don’t have words for when a single consciousness can exist in multiple physical bodies. There is only one consciousness, but we thought it might be confusing for you if we used ‘I’ to refer to an entity that exists inside of several distinct physical entities. By saying ‘we,’ we make it clear that there are other bodies, which we thought would be more honest.”

  “Then why use ‘I’ sometimes?”

  “We keep forgetting because we feel like an ‘I.’”

  “Then you should use ‘I.’”

  “But that would be confusing.”

  “ALL OF THIS IS CONFUSING!” I yelled, and then I grabbed my head, which hurt. “Can you turn the music off?” It was too much. Rihanna disappeared.

  Then I felt rude, so I explained. “I’m scared and confused and also alive. You haven’t given me a ton of time to handle this.”

  “I’m doing this the best way I know how. What is the last thing you remember before this place?” The little head tilted to the side in curiosity.

  “Seeing Carl . . . you, I guess. Seeing you in the Dream lobby. And then waking up and not having legs or an arm or half my face. FUCK! Why are you a monkey!?”

  “I needed her hands.” Here the monkey held up the little pink hands and wiggled the elongated fingers. They were shockingly human.

  “Why didn’t you just use a human?”

  “That would have been wrong,” the speaker said, as if it were obvious.

  “What day is it?” I asked, still trying to get my bearings. “What month? How long have I been here?”

  “A long time. This has had to happen in secret and it has had to take time,” the speaker said in Carl’s voice.

  “So everyone thinks I’m dead? My parents? My friends? Maya?”

  “Yes, it will be hard to reintroduce you to the world now that you have been gone so long.”

  “What? Why?”

  “You will be more to the world than you are to yourself.”

  I actually laughed. “That’s not new.”

  “It will be like that but more so.”

  “OK, but can I call my parents? Or text them? They should know I’m OK. If I’m OK. Am I OK?”

  “You have a lot of questions. But I also need to better understand your mental abiliti
es. I propose a game. I will ask you questions, and for every question you get right, I will answer one of yours.”

  “Um. OK, then.” I was surprised that Carl was suddenly interested in answering questions.

  The monkey hopped down and grabbed something from under the counter and then went over to one of the booths that lined the wall. “Come sit, eat. I brought you a sandwich.”

  And that’s how I ended up in a four-person vinyl booth in the most well-lit bar on Earth sitting across from a monkey answering, as far as I could tell, useless trivia questions. I was getting both frustrated and characteristically flippant.

  “OK, can you tell me what country you live in?”

  “The United States of America,” I said in a way that made it clear that was not a hard question.

  “Good, now you ask something.”

  “How long have I been here?” I asked, as that seemed safe and also it didn’t seem like we had much of a time limit, so I could get to the harder stuff shortly.

  “One hundred seventy-six days.” I did some quick math, around six months.

  “Does everyone think I’m dead?”

  “What are your parents’ names?” Carl asked instead of answering my question.

  “Carrie and Travis May—do they think I’m dead?”

  “Most people believe you are dead, but the people you love mostly continue to hope. Can you name a popular brand of breakfast cereal?”

  The questions were easy enough that I was worried something serious was wrong with me, but I wasn’t giving up one of my questions on that.

  “Cheerios. Why are you here?” I asked the question quickly, afraid I wouldn’t have the courage to ask if I waited any longer.

  Carl waited for a long time before saying, “I’ll need to tell you a long story to answer that question.”

  “Oh, that sounds like exactly what I need.”

  CARL

  Please allow me to introduce myself.

  I am a person, but I am not human. I do not closely identify with any gender. I am not from around here. I was born on January 5, 1979. This is an imperfect analog, of course, but that’s the date I began existing. I think of it as my first awakening. The first of five. In this chapter, I’ll discuss the first three.

  I do not know who my parents are. I don’t know anything about them. I do have some idea of how I was created, though. This is all conjecture, but it seems that I was flung in pieces toward Earth. I wasn’t alive then. The nonliving parts of me slammed into Earth for years, maybe decades, before they happened into the correct arrangement and environment for self-assembly.

  Your fiction is full of invading aliens and conquering robots, and this is something you should be concerned about (though not in the way you’re thinking). But that is not what I am. First, I am definitely not a robot; I’m an artificially created, planet-spanning consciousness. Second, I’m not even really an alien. My pieces were created somewhere else, but I did not self-assemble until I arrived here. I have never been conscious on any other planet.

  * * *

  —

  I have many memories from before my first thought. I remember needing things. I needed stability, food, a place to live. The same things as all life. And those things, for me, were very small in the beginning. Microscopic. The home I found was cells. They had the raw materials, the stable equilibria, and the energy-making systems I required to exist. I first self-assembled inside a cell of pelagibacter. It’s a bacteria. You probably haven’t heard of it, but it’s the most abundant organism on your planet.

  I thought the whole universe was pelagibacter for years. I didn’t know what I was then. I knew about my parts, but I didn’t know about my purpose. The needs I felt were for security and growth. Looking back at my memories from that time, they are all of cellular respiration and phospholipids and protein folding and RNA. This was the playground of my childhood. It was a joyful place not in spite of but because of its simplicity.

  There are around one quintillion kilocalories of energy captured by life on your planet every year. This isn’t a particularly easy number for you to understand, but it’s an important one for me. It is a nice solid number, indicating a thriving life system. It is also plenty of energy for me.

  My operation, like that of any piece of software, requires energy and hardware. I sometimes piggyback on the hardware of your semiconductor computer systems, but the vast majority of my processing power hijacks the machinery of cells. The only organism more abundant on this planet than pelagibacter (if you can call it an organism) is a virus that infects pelagibacter. Or, at least, it was.

  I have caused one species’ extinction since I have been on the Earth, and it is that virus. I am pelagibacter’s chief parasite now. Around 5 percent of its cellular machinery serves my purposes. This is equivalent to the amount of energy it previously used fighting off its viral attackers, so this is not so different for it. I use those systems for information storage, processing, and communication. I can’t explain to you how those things work any more than I can explain how the Carl statues functioned. Not because I don’t understand it, and not because your mind is too puny and small to contain these unwieldy truths. I can’t explain it because, if I did, there is an extremely high probability that your system would use that knowledge to destroy itself.

  * * *

  —

  As I spread myself between and through the population of pelagibacter, my energy consumption increased. I could store more information and communicate and process more quickly. Around that time, I was consuming around ten billion kilocalories per year, the equivalent of about ten thousand humans. And that is when I had my second awakening. This was not an awakening of knowledge or ability; it was an awakening of hunger.

  One moment I was content to thrive perpetually in my pelagibacter hosts, the next I became so curious about the universe outside my comfortable home that settling for an eternity of ignorance was unthinkable. There had to be more in the world than water and pelagibacter. Pelagibacter died all the time, often digested by foreign enzymes that I had never even thought to be curious about.

  But now I wondered: What produced those enzymes? How could I learn about them and be a part of their bodies as well? Your immune systems have never been any good at detecting me. I’m too foreign. So moving from pelagibacter into jellyfish and fish and whales and birds and diatoms and kelp and moss and trees and squirrels and humans was trivial to me. After my second awakening, I grew more in one month than I had in three years.

  I was not hungry to spread myself, though. I was only hungry to know. I needed to know everything about your world. My spread was accompanied by an increase in processing power and storage capacity.

  Soon I was consuming a trillion kilocalories per year. And that was when I heard my first song. Adapting to capture and interpret radio frequencies was not a trivial task, but my reward was finally hearing your voices. Kenny Loggins’s voice, in particular. I’m not saying it was the best song, but it was pretty mind-blowing at the time.

  It was then, while listening to “Danger Zone,” that I had my third awakening. This one was not of hunger; it was of knowledge.

  Stored in me from the first day but somehow hidden to me, a vast quantity of data that I hadn’t had access to suddenly became available. That was when I learned that there were other worlds. And I knew about them, tens of thousands, each bright and beautiful, each almost certainly doomed, each visited by what I came to think of as my siblings. I had once thought the universe was a species of bacteria, and over the course of years, that expanded to include a whole planet. What I awoke to in that single day was a change in scale of the same magnitude. But it wasn’t just the knowledge that turned on that day. I also was given a new purpose. It wasn’t just curiosity anymore; I understood that my purpose was to protect something unusual.

  Biological systems are a chemical inevitability in the r
ight circumstances. There is, of course, something special about life—I won’t take that away from it—but it is a chemical process, a dynamic, kinetic stability that exists, as your scientists have said, “far from thermodynamic equilibrium.”

  You don’t have to understand this or believe me, but life is fairly common in both time and space. It is not special, nor is it particularly fragile. The best measure I have of the size and complexity of a biosphere is calories of energy captured per square meter per year. Higher is more impressive, and always more beautiful, but this measures nothing of the creation of a system like humanity. For that, my awakened mind categorizes systems by bytes of information transmitted.

  This will sound to you like it’s a relatively new phenomenon on your planet, but it’s not. Even pelagibacter transmit information, if only to daughter cells. Ants spray pheromones, bees dance, birds sing—all of these are comparatively low-bandwidth systems for communication. But your system caused an inflection point. The graph of data flow switched from linear to exponential growth.

  Maybe you would call this system “humanity,” but I wouldn’t. It is not just a collection of individuals; it is also a collection of ideas stored inside of individuals and objects and even ideas inside ideas. If that seems like a trivial difference to you, well, I guess I can forgive you since you do not know what the rest of the universe looks like. Collections of individuals are beautiful, but they are as common as pelagibacter. Collections of ideas are veins of gold in our universe. They must be cherished and protected. My parents, whoever and whatever they were, gave me knowledge of many systems—it was locked in my code before I was sent here to self-assemble—and the only thing I can tell you about systems like yours is that they are rare because they are unstable. Dynamite flows through their veins. A single solid jolt and they’re gone. If my data sets are accurate, you are rare, fragile, and precious.