A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

by Hank Green

  Six: This is very new and I have no idea what to make of it, I am just going to copy and paste what I wrote in “News Summary.”

  Six: Altus, the software lab Peter Petrawicki and partners have been building in the Caribbean, has publicly launched a software package that reactivates a portion of the Carls’ dream space. A few people have gained access to it over the last weeks through a scavenger-hunt-like game, but now it has been released broadly.

  The software is free to download, but is extremely limited. But by doing . . . something I’m unclear on, users can earn AltaCoin. The fifty users with the highest AltaCoin totals at the end of each week are granted access to an exclusive, more robust version of the Altus Space. AltaCoin can be purchased on an exchange, and Altus takes a percentage of each transaction, which is their business model. Press has not spoken to anyone who has access to the full Altus Space, but that has not prevented many people from fighting very hard to be in the top fifty.

  I had an 8K VR rig, which I used mostly for porn. Indeed, my guess was that pretty much everyone who had a rig that nice on hand used it for porn at least as much as they used it for games. Having a top-of-the-line rig wasn’t prohibitively expensive for me.

  I started the download.

  I went back to the “Big News” chat to say my first words.

  Twelve: Hello everyone, I’m sorry to show up on a day like today. I’ll be trying the Space out soon as well.

  There was a chorus of hellos and apologies that no one was introducing themselves properly as they gathered information about the return of the Dream, however neutered and suddenly capitalistic.

  And then Five DM’d me.

  Five: Hi Twelve. Welcome to The Thread. I’ve been doing research on how to go into the Space and I wanted to make sure you play it safe along with me. Most important thing is that you are lying down somewhere stable and comfortable when you go in. Apparently it can be dangerous if your headset gets knocked around while you’re in the Space. The headset doesn’t actually show you the Space, it shows you images that activate the region of our brains the Carls created, or activated, or whatever, to make the Dream possible. It feeds information to the brain, but the eyes are just the pipe the information flows through. It’s like encoding digital information in an analog format . . . if that makes any sense.

  Twelve: Yes. I mean, no. Not really. I get that it isn’t a VR experience, only that the VR headset sends you into the Space. How it does it . . . I don’t understand.

  Five: Yeah, well, no one does. Maybe not even the people at Altus. In any case, follow the instructions to the letter. There are already reports of some people having very negative experiences. There’s a thread on a private forum I have access to called “bad trips,” and it sounds like the kind of thing you want to avoid at all costs.

  Twelve: Is it dangerous? They wouldn’t release it if it was dangerous, right?

  Five: Who the hell knows. It’s nice to have you going in as well, Twelve. Two points of view on this experience will be better for The Thread than one. When are you going?

  Twelve: As soon as my download completes. Looks like about 20 minutes still.

  Five: My download is finished . . . I’ll see you on the other side.

  Finally, the download hit 100 percent, and I installed the software. As always, there were licenses and notifications, but in among them was a pop-up that said, very clearly, “This software is known to cause upsetting visions in less than 1 percent of the population. These visions are extremely intense and unpleasant. Do not enter the Altus Space if you are not willing to take this risk.”

  It felt like an alternate reality game. I guess, in its way, it was. I clicked OK.

  The display switched to the headset. I put it on, adjusting the knobs slightly from the last time I’d worn it. The display showed an open white room that said “Click OK to Begin.”

  I laid myself down on my bed with my headset on and the controller in my hand and clicked OK.

  A crisp, female voice filled my ear.

  “Welcome to Altus version 0.4. I am Alta, your assistant. You are about to enter the Open Access area of the Altus Space. This area is designed for us to help you help us develop a more robust experience for the world. In it, you will be able to create experiences and objects for other users. You will be able to buy and sell these creations using AltaCoin. Every week, the fifty users in Open Access who have earned the most AltaCoin selling their creations will be given access to the Premium Space. If at any point you want to leave the Space, just say the word ‘Exit.’ If this makes sense, please nod.”

  I nodded.

  “Good, now we will enter the Open Access Space.”

  A gray field appeared in front of me with black crosshairs in the center.

  “Please look at the X in the center of your screen. Do not look away.”

  I looked intently at the X as swirls of color began flowing through my field of view. My instinct was to follow them, of course, but I didn’t. I kept my eyes locked on the X as the colors became more vibrant and distinct. It was intense, and even a little beautiful, and then, suddenly . . .

  I do not know how to properly describe this first moment. We all have a sense that our minds and our bodies are different things, but outside of a dream, this is the only way I know how to actually experience it. The feeling of the hair on your head, gone. All of the aches and pains of everyday existence, vanished. You are a presence with senses, but no body through which to sense. My heart was racing. Peter Petrawicki was a shithead, but this was amazing.

  “Excellent,” the voice said, now coming not through headphones but from everywhere. “Welcome to the Open Access Altus Space. We will now give you your body. If anything goes wrong, please say the word ‘Exit.’”

  In a blink, I had arms and legs again. And I was completely nude.

  “Congratulations on joining the next step in human history with Altus,” Alta said. There was nothing here but my body standing on a gray floor that extended forever in every direction. The sky or ceiling or whatever was white and infinite. “In this space, you can come and think. You can rest here instead of sleeping, and you will wake up feeling completely refreshed. But there is also nothing to do. That is because you have not created or purchased any objects to exist in your Altus Space. At Altus, we have created a few objects for you.” A desk appeared, and then a chair. “But we need you to create more objects. To do that, you can use these tools.” Suddenly a menu appeared, as if I were inside of a graphics-editing program.

  “You can use these tools to build things, as simple as a shiny ball, as complicated as a pet. You are now an Altus developer. When you are done with your object, you may, if you wish, list it for sale in the Altus Space Store. You can earn AltaCoin by selling your creations. You can also convert other currencies into AltaCoin at AltaExchange .com. AltaCoin is a cryptocurrency that is, at the moment, only mined by us at Altus, so there is a limited amount. We will be opening mining to the public shortly.”

  As Alta said these things, images appeared in my Altus Space, showing me how easy it would be to convert my money into AltaCoin.

  “Right now, we are letting fifty people per week into the Premium Altus Space, and we’re choosing those people based on who has earned the most AltaCoin. When I say ‘earned,’ I mean it. While all AltaCoin can be used to purchase items for your Altus Space, only AltaCoin earned by selling your creations will be counted toward your total for access to the Premium Altus Space.”

  There was no explanation of what made the Premium Space better than the Open Access Space, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t want in. I opened the Altus Space Store, which had been shown to me in that introductory tutorial, and saw what the most popular products were. Shirts and pants topped the list. The first non-clothing item, I was surprised to find, was carpet. I guess that made sense now that I thought about it. It would be easy to make, and the infinite plane of gray wou
ld probably get old pretty fast. There were a number of household items, from beds to lamps. And also high on the list were a few very simple rooms. A good room would be hard to make—wall textures, molding, ceilings.

  I had no interest in buying any of these things. I needed to make AltaCoin, not spend it, so I had to create something, something popular that would also be simple. It occurred to me that people, with their carpets and walls and ceilings and lamps, were all solving the same problem in the same way. The problem was a big, boring, overly bright, somewhat grating world. But I was pretty sure there was another, faster way to solve it.

  I couldn’t be the first person to think of this, but as I scrolled through the store, I couldn’t find anyone who had done it.

  I closed the store with a swipe of my hand and opened the Altus Editor. It was built roughly like any other 3-D design engine, and I’d used plenty of those before. I started out with a vector of a tall, thin triangle about the length and width of my forearm. I programmed its stiffness to be just enough to hold its own weight; then I brushed it with a soft green color along the edges, and a slightly yellower green down the middle.

  Then I cloned that shape a few dozen times and made slight modifications, widening some, curving others.

  Then I arranged them randomly, cloned them a bunch of times, and shrank the whole thing down to a one-foot-by-one-foot patch and lowered it to the ground. A beautiful, perfect, natural-looking square of grass.

  The Altus engine didn’t seem to have a way for me to expand this texture across a wide range, so instead I cloned and cloned and cloned. My patch of grass expanded exponentially until it was nearly a mile on a side.

  I wasn’t done, though. To finish, I created a one-meter-wide hollow sphere and painted its interior a nearly uniform blue, using a lighter blue around its circumference. I streaked it with white, marked its luminosity at 30 percent maximum, and then changed its diameter to ten miles. I was no longer in an infinite plane. I was standing outside on a beautiful spring day.

  Honestly, it was rough, but it had only been maybe an hour of work. I went back to the Altus Space Store and saw that I was too late. Another creator had indeed already listed an object called Outside, complete with grass and a sky. It was listed at 10 AltaCoin and was already in the top-fifty most popular items. Fuck.

  You could preview an object. So, even though I didn’t have any AltaCoin yet, I could still try out “Outside” for myself for a thirty-second trial. I did and was even more frustrated. The sky was a uniform blue sphere, the grass blades a flat green and had no weight of their own. I knew that mine was better, but it wasn’t better enough to climb the ranks.

  I kicked at my grass, which I was shocked to find actually interacted with my naked foot.

  That gave me an idea.

  I created a solid cube ten miles on a side, which meant, immediately, I was inside it. So, first step, I made it 100 percent transparent so I could see the landscape instead of the uniform gray of being stuck inside a solid cube. I opened up the property called viscosity and began to move it up. As I did, my arm had to work harder and harder to move. I was pushing against the interior of the cube!

  I pulled the viscosity down until I could just barely feel its force as I moved my arm through the cube’s interior.

  Then I set some animation key frames on the cube. I set it to move one mile over the course of five hours, then move back to its original position over another five hours. Then I set it to continue that loop forever.

  I hovered my hand over the OK button for just a second before I slapped it. Suddenly, beautifully, a gentle breeze began to blow over my, yes, still entirely naked body.

  I looked down, and the fucking grass was rustling in the wind.

  Fuck yes. OK, this place was amazing. This whole thing was amazing! And this was the Open Access? What was Premium like?!

  I titled my object Breezy Spring Day 1.0 and listed it for sale for 5 AltaCoin, the equivalent of, at that point, around $2.50.

  SÃO PAULO CLIMATE TALKS DETERIORATE AS SCANDAL WIDENS

  Associated Press

  After the scandal initially brought to light by an anonymous online news organization, The Thread, the United Nations has officially brought the São Paulo climate talks to an end without resolution. The talks were scheduled to go on for another four days, but after several sources confirmed the truth of the allegations, representatives are returning to their respective nations.

  A number of classified documents and emails were leaked in the midst of the talks, showing that US and EU representatives were receiving gifts, including lavish hotel rooms, from the Chinese solar power industry. The scandal quickly overshadowed the summit.

  “We think it’s best to move this down the road so that we can take a close look at what’s happened before moving forward,” said Senator Corey Knudsen, head of the US congressional delegation.

  APRIL

  Warren, Vermont, barely existed. It felt like a perfect hiding spot. I had convinced myself that if we got completely off the grid, not only could we hide from the authorities, we could also hide from Carl. That’s why I liked a middle-of-nowhere cabin on a road that didn’t go anywhere with no Wi-Fi and no cell phones.

  The thruway sliced deceptively past Warren, making you feel as if the town hadn’t even happened. But if you pulled off at just the right moment, you’d find yourself in a downtown with a general store that doubled as a gas station that advertised 99-cent video rentals. The only thing that was important to me right then was finding someplace in the world that felt even a little bit safe.

  Maya paid for the cabin with some of the cash I had stolen from the ATM. It was part of a larger hotel complex that seemed to mostly be there for vacationing skiers. It was beautiful and calm and it backed right up to a stream.

  As I watched her begin unpacking our bags, the same feeling I had felt when I first pounded down the door and saw Maya rippled through my brain. I had been so scared and angry, and when I saw her, for a fraction of a moment, I was intensely happy. But then it ended, and my emotions returned to their smooth, glossy tranquility. I was ready to hide there forever.

  If only.

  The cabin had a little kitchenette/living room, separated from the single bedroom. I was sitting on the couch when Maya came back from the little general store with some snacks.

  “So . . .” She sat down. I could see her trying not to look too long at my face. “You’ve been gone for six months. It’s a long time. A lot has happened. Do you want me to catch you up?”

  I looked up at her and said, “Andy has been touring the world trying to carry a positive message even as the world is having a harder and harder time holding on to one. Robin is now Andy’s assistant, they’re becoming good friends.”

  I took a breath and took in Maya’s face. Her beautiful, confused face.

  I continued, “Miranda has left her lab at Berkeley for a job at Peter Petrawicki’s new start-up, which has just launched its pilot project, a kind of full-body-immersion virtual reality. You, well, it seems like you’ve been spending a whole lot of time on the Som searching for me. I do not understand how you found me. There’s a scavenger hunt called Fish, it has something to do with Altus, and it’s somehow being weaponized against us.”

  “How in the name of Jesus did you know any of that?” Maya asked.

  “The same way I knew those cops’ wives’ names. Carl didn’t explain it to me. I lost it and ran.” I didn’t tell her that the real reason I lost it was that Carl had also replaced the parts of my brain that made decisions and taken away my emotions.

  “Ask me a question I don’t know the answer to,” I told her.

  “Uh, what is the capital of Thailand?”

  I formed the thought in my head. I know the capital of Thailand, don’t I? I just can’t quite think of it . . .

  And then—fwop—a little toothpick tapped
the back of my eyeball and suddenly I knew. The smaller the request, the smaller the pain. But even the big dumps I could clench my teeth through now. On the drive I’d asked for the top story in the Washington Post, and the full text was suddenly in my brain. I didn’t understand it until I thought about it, though. It was like I had a memory sitting there waiting for me to remember it for the first time. The launch of Altus hadn’t made the top. Instead, the story was about the international climate talks that had been happening in São Paulo, and how they had completely fallen apart. I asked for the second story; it was a follow-up on a recent bombing that targeted the president of Afghanistan. The third-highest story was about an economic report that pointed to looming recession. People weren’t buying cars, and builders weren’t building homes.

  “Bangkok,” I told Maya.

  “Did that hurt?”

  “A little. It seems like I’m getting better at it. I did it a lot while you were driving. I just kept asking, and I kept getting answers. Things in the world are pretty fucked-up, aren’t they.”

  “We just couldn’t hold it together without you,” Maya answered.

  Ever since Carl told me about my brain, I hadn’t felt like much of a human, but seeing Maya there, with that look of desperation on her face, I decided that I could at least act human.

  “Are you OK?” I asked.

  “April . . .” She moved from the chair over to the couch. “April, I did it. I found you.” She leaned into me and said quietly, “I found you.” I reached my arms around her and held her. Not because I wanted to, but because the part of my brain Carl had built told me it was the right thing to do.

  But then it started to feel right. Her short hair tickled my nose, and my hands, both real and new, pushed into her tummy, and it felt as right as anything ever had. But then she pushed away, and the look she gave me was hard.