by Hank Green
You know where you came from, but you don’t know why you exist. I’ve got that flipped: I have no idea who built me or sent me here, but I do know exactly what I’m for. I was sent here in pieces to self-assemble and then mutualistically infect your planet because, without me, a fascinating and beautiful system would have a low probability of self-correcting to sustainability. In other words, someone somewhere was pretty sure you were going to destroy yourself, and they felt like you were worth saving, so they sent me.
I’ve always known that failure was possible, but I had no idea what would happen if I failed.
APRIL
Fuck me, right? Carl is all “Secret secret secret, don’t tell anyone anything, be silent and mysterious for eternity,” and then I wake up with more mother-of-pearl inlay than a Chinese coffee table, and Carl is like, “I was born on January 5, 1979 . . .”
It’s a LOT! I didn’t handle the info dump particularly well in the moment. It didn’t come out all at once either. I asked them questions, growing increasingly overwhelmed and dispassionate, and they quizzed me on everything from word problems to my family tree. By the way, I’m using they/them pronouns for Carl, not because they are a plural consciousness, though I sometimes think they are, but because they are not a he or a she.
Carl had seemed pleased with the operation of my brain up to that point. I’d had a couple little pains in my eye, but they kept saying, “It is normal for now,” whenever I complained. It didn’t occur to me that that could honestly be said of anything that was currently happening.
Listening to Carl tell me that life is so common as to be a kind of chemical inevitability, but also that my species—my “system”—was doomed without intervention, wasn’t possible without a bit of emotional distance, which my subconscious did provide for me. I understood everything that was being said, but I did not have a strong emotional reaction to it. This didn’t seem odd to me at the time.
Part of that (definitely not all of it, as we shortly will see) was that the whole “you humans are fucking this thing up” part wasn’t 100 percent surprising. Humans do think ahead more than any other animal, but that isn’t saying much. The oceans are filled with plastic, and the atmosphere is filled with carbon dioxide. We’ve built enough bombs to destroy everything ten times over, but apparently solar panels were just one expense too many! Being told that humanity is doomed is a big deal, but this wasn’t the first time I’d been told that.
I had gotten a lot of answers very fast and with a fairly weird level of detail, but I was still left with plenty of confusion. What I didn’t know was that I still had only a fraction of the story. At that point, I thought we were only being threatened by ourselves.
Carl didn’t give me time to think.
“What is your favorite movie?” they asked, just after they told me of their third awakening.
“Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” I said, which, like, I dunno, maybe it was, but mostly I just wanted to get to my question. We’d gotten to the part that I was, naturally, most curious about.
“Why me?”
“To provide your system with the highest chance for survival, the protocols that have worked best on other hierarchical systems all began with a low-impact intervention featuring a public-facing envoy interacting with a single chosen host. The envoy was me, in the form of the robot Carl. You were chosen as the host.”
That was a lot, and yet still my body refused to release the necessary hormones for this knowledge to kick me into panic.
“But why me?”
“A number of simulations were run. More were successful with you as host than with anyone else.”
“How many simulations?” I asked immediately.
“What was Yoda’s last name?”
“He doesn’t have a last name,” I guessed. “How many simulations?”
“Around seventy quadrillion.”
Seventy quadrillion? What? I did not then, nor do I now, have a good basis for understanding that number. But there was something nagging at me, and as long as I was getting information out of Carl, I was going to keep going for it.
“Do you wish to continue asking questions?” They must have been reading my facial expressions somehow because I was maybe getting a little lost in the size of it all.
“Yes,” I said.
“In what year was the first Ford Mustang produced?” They were using the terrible monkey voice now, which I was already getting kinda used to.
“I definitely never knew that. I don’t even want to know that.”
“What is fourteen times twenty-nine?”
“Can I have a pencil?”
“How many furlongs are in a mile?”
“Yeah, that one is also not in the ol’ database.”
“Who was Ronald Reagan’s wife?”
“Oh, I actually might know that. I feel like I should know that . . .” And then my head exploded in pain, my left eye filled with light, and I vomited on the monkey.
* * *
—
I woke up sometime later, still in the booth. The intro drumbeats to “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley thumped out of the Alexa. I had been cleaned up a little bit, and the puke had been wiped from the table.
The song faded a little lower and the speaker voice spoke. “That was unexpected.”
“Where did monkey Carl go?”
“Right here.” And indeed, from around the corner came the little monkey, wet but not sopping, with a small hand towel draped over its shoulder and a glass of water in its hand.
“Nancy Reagan,” I said. “Nancy Reagan was Ronald Reagan’s wife. She was born in New York City and met Ronald Reagan because they were both actors. She came up with the ‘Just Say No’ antidrug campaign. Wait, why do I know so much about Nancy Reagan?”
“Can you walk back over to your bed?” the monkey rasped. “This body cannot carry you.”
“Why do I know so much about Nancy Reagan, Carl?” I said more loudly. I could feel the pressure building as my heart beat faster.
“Things aren’t going exactly as expected, please come over to the bed,” the smart speaker voice chimed in. The illusion that there were two of them was disorienting.
Suddenly I felt way less scared.
“Can I have some water?” I asked. And then I thought: I wasn’t acting right. None of this made sense. “Carl, why am I not freaking out more? I feel like I should be angry or scared, but I’m not.”
The monkey reached out to me with the cup. I swished some water in my mouth, and then, not knowing where to spit, I scrunched my face and swallowed.
“Can you lie down, April?” The smart speaker spoke in a soft tone.
“Carl, please answer me.” I knew something was wrong. Every time I felt my panic surge, as I was sure it should, it ebbed out of me.
Finally, after a long time, it spoke: “When people are hurt and go to the hospital, doctors give them painkillers so that they don’t hurt. And sometimes doctors give patients painkillers so that they are less scared. Your mind is currently regulating your fear.”
“My mind?”
“Yes, systems in your mind.”
“Systems that you put there,” I confirmed out loud, because it was obvious. I felt my anger surge and then wash out like a wave, something that you only know was there because of what it left behind.
“April, your mind has new abilities now. You accessed your link, and the bandwidth was higher than expected.”
“‘Link’? What did you do to me?” It was the obvious question. It was one thing to have a new body, another to have a new face, but what had happened to my mind?
“I had to rebuild you.”
“It seems like you did more than that!” My anger shot out a spike, but then it retracted and smoothed over again.
“I didn’t know how to limit you. Your legs
, they’re stronger than before. You can lift more now. If you cut your new skin, it will heal immediately.”
“That’s my body, you know that isn’t the same,” I said.
“I know. You imagine yourself as your mind. And I had to change your mind to repair it and allow it to function with your body and avoid the pain you would otherwise be feeling.”
It was hard to understand what Carl was talking about for a bunch of really good reasons. Like, it’s hard enough to try to grasp the philosophy of mind and identity even when it isn’t being delivered by a . . . cylinder.
“You are a story that you tell yourself, and even if it is not always accurate, it is who you are, and that is very important to you. I did not know what else to do. Your brain was damaged, your mind too. I had to rebuild it, but your physiology is too beautiful. The integration was not too difficult, but replacing what was lost was. Your mind is different now. You have new abilities.”
“What . . . can I do?”
“Having an ability is not the same as having a skill. You can play piano, you just haven’t learned. Just as you can now receive and interpret radio signals, but haven’t yet learned how.”
“Radio . . . signals?” My mind was swimming. “What part of my mind was replaced by all of this?” I asked as my panic started to well up, the smooth pearl of my emotions growing jagged again.
“Not replaced. I attempted to restore whatever function was lost. No memories were lost. Indeed, your memory should be much better now. What you lost were systems for decision making.”
“Systems for decision making,” I repeated numbly.
“Yes, the frameworks you use for deciding on a course of action.”
“And what did you replace them with?”
“Approximations.”
“Expand on that.” I was starting to feel like I was talking to a Wikipedia article.
“Approximations based on my knowledge of you.”
“So you guessed.”
There was an unusual pause.
“Yes,” the speaker said finally.
“And did you think maybe I should have some say in this?”
“The alternative was leaving you incomplete.”
* * *
—
Every night, you brush your teeth, you change out of your clothes, you lie down in a bed. And every morning, you wake up. There’s that period in there, generally six to nine hours, in which you just aren’t anymore. Excuse me for having thought about this a lot, but how does it not terrify us that we spend a third of every day in a conscious unconsciousness, living inside a virtual reality created by our own minds but that somehow we don’t control? Like . . . what?!
I don’t want to make you afraid of sleep, sleep is dope, but this is the kind of thing you start to think about when you lose track of where “you” starts and ends because of how a piece of your brain, and maybe even the whole thing, is a best-guess estimation. If I am a story that I tell myself, then there are very real ways in which that story ended in a warehouse in New Jersey.
I don’t have a word for what happened to me, but it is scary and sad, and it felt like a betrayal. I was suddenly certain that Carl had replaced the parts of me that made me me. I stood up from the booth and said, “I would like to leave.”
“You can’t.”
“Well, that makes this a lot worse, doesn’t it. Because now I’m a prisoner and you’ve kidnapped me, experimented on me, and are confining me.”
The monkey jumped up on the table and said, “April, please stay. It would be dangerous for you to leave.”
“Because of what you did to me,” I accused.
“Because of what I had to do to you,” they croaked.
Whatever thing had been holding back my emotions finally broke, and I yelled, suddenly, “I’M NOT HUMAN ANYMORE!” The fear and anger hit hard then. “I’M. NOT. HUMAN. YOU TOOK THAT AWAY!” And then I realized a big part of the reason I was so upset, so I said it out loud: “YOU MADE ME WHAT THEY ALL SAID I WAS! FUCK! FUCK!!”
“April, please,” the monkey continued. “There is much more to explain.”
“I don’t have to do any fucking thing.” I walked away. There was a door in the back, by the stage, and I went toward it. The monkey stepped in front of me, screeching like they were actually a monkey. I kicked at it. The door was solid, big, and metal. It was the kind of door that held me in a warehouse office while the building began to burn. I shoved at the push bar. It did not move. It felt bolted in place. I slammed my hands against the door in frustration. I pulled my hands away and saw the dent my left hand had made.
The monkey came up behind, ceasing their wailing, and said, “There is much more I need to explain.” I slammed just my left hand against the door again, it bent outward. Rick Astley was finishing his song. Had it only been a few minutes since I woke up? Had my whole world changed that fast?
I planted my feet, pulled back my arm, and slammed the door right where the dead bolt should go. It flew out, taking a hunk of the door frame with it.
The darkness outside was jarring after the light of the bar. I stood for a moment, waiting for my eyes to adjust, but before they got the chance, I stepped out into the darkness.
MIRANDA
I woke up early the next morning and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I got dressed, packed my bag, and then, not knowing what else to do, went into the common room of the dorm that I’d walked through the night before. The building was obviously hastily made. The walls were painted a dusty green, but you could still see the seams in the drywall. There was no stove, just a microwave, two refrigerators, a couple different kinds of coffee makers, and a SodaStream. I went to the fridge and got out a bottle of home-carbonated bubble water and poured myself a glass.
A couple of guys were up, eating cereal and watching, I was pretty sure, Bumblebee on the flat-screen TV.
One of them gestured to me and said to the other, audibly, “They should tell the new recruits to bring DVDs in their bags. I’m not saying this is a bad movie, but a fourth viewing doesn’t feel necessary.”
“You’ve got to watch DVDs?” I asked, horrified.
“No streaming, no cable, not even anything to pick up with an antenna. We’re pretty out of it here.” He was wearing a baseball cap that just had the area code 605 on it.
“There’s no internet at all?”
“There’s internet—it’s slow, first of all, entirely satellite. But it’s locked down tight. Unless you have top-level clearance, you can only access the intranet. It’s got most of what you need, though. I’m Har.”
“You’re Har?” His smile was big and friendly, but as I shook his hand, I watched his eyes tear down my body. As mentioned, there were not a lot of women in this place.
“That’s what they call me anyway. This is Marigold.” He gestured to the guy sitting next to him, whose messy blond hair reminded me of Andy. He waved at me without looking up.
“I’m Miranda. Bumblebee, eh?” I was skeptical.
“It’s not that bad. Definitely the best of the Transformers movies.”
“I’ve felt different about them since Carl,” I said.
He let out a little spurt of laughter. “I’ve felt different about everything since Carl.”
“I guess that’s not wrong. Do you mind?” I was pulling a chair over.
“Please, it’s a free island.”
“In my experience so far, it is one of the less free islands.”
He chuckled without looking away from the movie. I was coming into it halfway through, so I was pretty confused, and mostly I just thought about Carl and April and looked around the room. All at once I noticed that the big bowl next to the TV was full of condoms. This really was like a college dorm.
“Hey, what was your first screen name?” Har asked after we’d watched for ten minutes or so.
“Huh.” I thought back, and then laughed out loud. “That is a surprisingly personal question.”
“Come on, what have you got to lose?” he asked.
“Well, it was on Neopets, it was a virtual pet simulator—”
“I know what Neopets is. What was the screen name?”
“OK, fine. Diggles?”
Har and Marigold leapt off the couch with huge smiles on their faces and shouted, “HOOOOO!!!!!” They whooped and hollered. I sat there, eyes wide, completely confused. The movie was forgotten. Marigold, who had said nothing to me at all, was now staring at me with a big, joyful smile, and then he yelled, “WELCOME TO ALTUS, DIGGLES!!”
I finally stood up. “What is happening!?”
“Everyone at Altus goes by their first screen name—that is, if we can get it out of people. It’s kinda a big deal to get someone’s name before anyone else, especially if you get it before they find out about the tradition. No offense, Diggles, but that was pretty easy.” The frat house vibe was real.
“I’m a very trusting person. Are you actually going to keep calling me Diggles?”
“For as long as you’re here!” Har shouted. Their names suddenly made a lot more sense.
“Well, enjoy calling me Diggles for the next few hours, then. I’m afraid I washed out early.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Huh?”
“I don’t know what you know, but what I know is that you’re going on a tour today that they only give to people who have been hired. We’re here to gather you and a couple other kids who got jobs.”
What the hell? I thought about telling them they were wrong, but maybe they were right. Or maybe someone had just forgotten to file my paperwork and I was about to get my last chance to learn about Altus!
“So, when are we going over?” I asked.