A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

by Hank Green

  “I’m going to need you to apologize to me,” she said. “Not right now. You need time to think about what you’re going to say, because if you do it wrong, I don’t know that I’ll ever forgive you.”

  “That’s terrifying,” I said with a stab of fear, almost as big as the one I’d felt as I initiated a fistfight with two police officers. I still wasn’t sure how I had beat them both.

  “But in the meantime,” Maya said, pulling a DVD out from underneath the pile of snacks, “I have acquired the best thing created in 1993.” It was Pauly Shore’s Son in Law.

  I smiled, and I really was happy, just not as happy as I knew I should have been.

  I can’t remember this conversation without smelling that cabin. Popcorn and dust and wood and old paper. We were there for such a tiny amount of time, but it seems so sharp to me. Just those first moments of not being alone anymore, even if they were tense, and even if I was still very lost. Son in Law is ruined for me forever; it will only ever be about those moments, doing everything I could to ignore the fact that a space alien had told me I was the last, best hope for humanity’s survival. I’ll never be able to watch a Pauly Shore movie again without reliving what was about to happen.

  “Jesus Christ!” Maya shouted from the kitchen, where she was popping another bag of popcorn.

  I stood up so fast the chair I was sitting on flew back. “What is it, what’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know, it’s nothing. I . . . I just saw, like, the biggest squirrel I have ever seen in my life out the window. It’s fine,” she breathed. “It just scared me.”

  “How certain are you that it was a squirrel?” I asked, trying to sound very serious.

  She laughed.

  “I’m not kidding.”

  “I mean, I don’t know, it didn’t really look like a squirrel, but it was small and fuzzy.”

  “Could it have been a monkey?” I asked, starting to slink toward the door.

  “I mean, sure, maybe, I haven’t seen many monkeys.”

  “Fuck . . . FUCK!” I said.

  “What?”

  “There are things I haven’t told you. I think it might be about time to explain,” I said, and then I jerked open the door.

  A man jumped back from the doorway. He was wearing tight blue jeans and a red plaid shirt. His hand went to his waist, and he pulled up a gun.

  “April May?” he asked, pointing the gun at the ground in front of us.

  I could feel Maya’s presence burning behind me, but she was still and silent. I could not turn away from the man.

  “Yes?” I said calmly.

  “I need you to come with me.” He gestured toward his car.

  “Did Fish send you?” I asked, my initial fear having washed away.

  “Yes.” He fidgeted with the gun in his hand. “Come with me, outside.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Come. With. ME!” Each word came out louder than the last. He was shaking. This guy was not a cop; he was not used to holding a gun.

  “No, you have to go right now,” I said, my voice steady.

  And then he raised his gun up to point it at me and said, “Oh god, I’m so sorry . . .” He closed his eyes, and suddenly I realized he wasn’t here to abduct me. Still my panic wouldn’t come. I yelled, “MAYA, GET DOWN.”

  A fuzzy blur streaked out of the darkness and onto the man’s face, screaming high-pitched and inhuman. The gun popped, but I didn’t feel anything. I reached out and grabbed his wrist with my left hand and squeezed. He screamed. The bone under my pinky went first, and then the one cradled in the pad between my thumb and forefinger cracked. His arm felt like Play-Doh in my hand.

  He dropped to his knees as I let go.

  “What the fuck! What the fuck!” Maya was yelling behind me.

  “It’s OK,” I said.

  “Maya has been shot.” Carl’s voice came out of a smartwatch that the monkey was wearing like a collar.

  I turned around in time to see monkey Carl arrive at Maya’s side, but she pushed them away. “No!” she said in terror and anger. I felt like I was floating, like I was seeing from outside of my body.

  She made a noise, just a long low vowel sound.

  “Maya . . .” I was suddenly on my knees next to her. I didn’t remember getting there. I finally broke eye contact and looked at her. She coughed. Blood came out of her mouth.

  “Maya!” I shouted. I didn’t know what else to say. I looked down at her body and didn’t even see where she had been hit. The black folding fabric of her hoodie was obscuring what had happened. I lifted it up and saw, under her right breast, a black hole.

  “No. No no no no!” I realized it was my voice. Apply pressure. You have to apply pressure.

  “CALL SOMEONE!” I said to Carl. They were a monkey, but they had to know how to get help. “CALL SOMEONE!” I pushed my hands onto the wound. The blood came up through my fingers. Maya was crying, awake, in pain, her breathing coming in small, rapid gasps.

  “No NO NO!” I heard myself screaming. A mantra now. Whatever dam had kept my emotions at bay had broken. The force of them now eroded everything inside of me until I was nothing but the fear.

  And then my left hand began to . . . change. The stony fingers merged with each other until it was not a hand at all. I was pushing on her ribs, but now I could feel that my hand was not solid. It was melting. I could feel it trickling down through the fingers of my right hand and into the hole in her chest.

  Her eyes squeezed shut and she gasped. “AHHHH! What is . . . what is happening?” she asked.

  “I don’t know!” I said in my own panic. I wanted to pull away, but I could not imagine leaving her. Suddenly, my oozing hand began to retract into itself and re-form where it had been. I pulled my hands back from her and saw that the spot where the hole had been was now a writhing, pulsing mass of the white stuff. As I watched, from its center rose a small lump of yellow metal. The bullet.

  I looked down at my left hand; it was noticeably smaller than the right and had no pinky finger.

  “She will be all right,” Carl said in my ear. “We have to go.”

  I shot up from Maya’s side and ran toward the door. The man had stood up from where he’d dropped when I broke him, and was stumbling back toward a small gray car. Time flashed forward, and suddenly I was shoving him with both hands. He flew forward, crunching against the hood of his car. Another gap in my memory. Now I was standing over him, his back on the hood of his gray Honda. I reached up, pulling my now thinner, four-fingered left hand back. His eyes were big and wide and weak. In my mind, I envisioned what was about to happen. When I punch him, I thought, the hand will go through his head and into the metal of his car. I don’t think I wanted to kill him—I just wanted to put my hand through his head. And then everything went black.

  MAYA

  I didn’t feel like I was dying anymore, but I also did not feel good. My chest felt like a professional had punched it with brass knuckles. With every wet, bloody breath, my chest shouted like I’d breathed in a handful of thumbtacks. As I stood, I felt light-headed, like I might pass out. I looked down and saw thick smears of blood on the floor and almost fainted but managed to hold it together.

  April had just run outside, and I needed to see her. When I got to the doorway, I saw taillights trailing away, and outlined on the edge of the porch light’s reach was a body lying on the ground. I ran to her.

  “APRIL!”

  She didn’t move.

  “Maya,” a soft, careful voice came behind me. I didn’t want to turn because I knew what I’d seen. That thing, that little furry thing that had come to me after I got shot. But what else was I going to do? I turned to look. It was a monkey, barely more than a foot tall, with tawny fur, a pink face, and golden eyes. It was wearing a smartwatch around its neck like a choker.

  Its lips didn’t
move as it said, “She’s OK. I had to make her unconscious because I was worried that she was going to kill that man.”

  I dropped down to my knees. I looked at its eyes. They looked . . . concerned. Careful.

  “What is going on?”

  “I am Carl,” the monkey said, reaching a hand out to me like I would shake it. I didn’t.

  “I will explain everything,” the monkey continued, “but we have to go now. That man won’t be the last one he sends.”

  “The last one who sends?” I gasped out, lowering my head down into a child’s pose to combat my light-headedness. My chest screamed.

  “I really do want to explain,” Carl said. “But not now. Please, let’s go pack. We can leave April here for now. She won’t wake up for a while.”

  And so I slowly climbed back on my feet and went inside. I threw all of our stuff into bags and threw the bags into the truck.

  Somehow, while I was inside, the tiny monkey had gotten April into the passenger seat of the truck.

  “Are you OK to drive?” the monkey asked me.

  “I mean, you’re not going to,” I said.

  “No. But I could have April do it.”

  “She’s unconscious.”

  “I could inhabit her body. I don’t like doing it, but I will if we need to.”

  I didn’t really know what this meant, but thinking about watching April’s body being driven around by a space alien made me queasy.

  “No, no, I think I’m fine. I can drive. Where are we going?”

  I didn’t like any of this. I didn’t want to be with Carl; I wanted to be with April.

  “We’re going someplace unpredictable. I can block them from tracking you, but I cannot block them from predicting where you will go. You need to be much less predictable.”

  “How is going to the middle-of-nowhere Vermont predictable!?”

  “I was able to predict that you would read a book left under a wet, moldy carpet in the trash heap behind a motel. Humans are, to us, very predictable.”

  “You put the book there?” I asked, and then immediately followed up with “What do you mean, ‘us’?!” I was not handling any of this well. Then again, I had been shot. April was unconscious. There was a talking monkey. And it was Carl.

  “I am going to explain everything, but we make our location extremely improbable as quickly as possible—turn here.”

  We turned onto what seemed to be a larger road.

  “When April first woke,” Carl told me, “she was unpredictable and very afraid. Her body was incomplete and broken, so I put a protocol in place that would prevent her from feeling too much too strongly.”

  “She told me, she said that she couldn’t have strong emotions anymore.”

  “That is mostly true, though a couple times it has been more than the protocols would or could control. But it was always meant to be temporary. I need to turn it off. When she wakes up, the protocol will be disabled. She will have her normal emotive processing. It will be difficult.”

  We drove for a while as their words sank in, and then we entered a larger town. Large enough that there was a Walmart. “Turn right,” Carl announced calmly. “Left.” And then, in a couple blocks, “Right again.” We had pulled into the parking lot of a high school. “Pull up there.” They pointed toward a windowless brick building.

  The monkey and I piled out of the truck. “Why are we at a high school?” I asked.

  “Because it’s unpredictable!” The monkey made a flourish with their hands as they said it. I was not amused.

  “I’ll be back shortly,” they told me, and then they padded over to the brick wall of the school and swiftly walked around the base. They turned a corner and then they were gone from view.

  There was a door on the side of the building that didn’t have an outward-facing handle, and not five minutes later, I heard a scratching coming from it and walked over.

  “I’m going to shove the door out, please catch it,” Carl said from inside.

  Suddenly the door popped open. I slid my fingers in. It was a big, heavy metal door. I pulled it open, and Carl came out.

  “I’ll hold the door open, go get your things from the truck. There is a staircase just inside, go down these stairs. There is a boiler room below. I have collected a number of useful items down there. I’ll bring April down.”

  I winced as I pulled the bags out of the back of the truck. I couldn’t breathe without pain; any other movement approached agony. I looked through the back window as I did it and saw April still slumped against the door, as if sleeping.

  I carried the bags into the building and gingerly walked down the stairs, doing what I could to concentrate on my steps, not on how Carl was going to “bring April down”—and whether that meant they were going to “inhabit” her body. They certainly weren’t going to carry her; the monkey body weighed like ten pounds.

  The boiler room was dark except for the light cast by a couple floor lamps. There was a futon and a couch and a small refrigerator. I opened it and found it stocked with sandwiches and bottled water. A scuffling came from back toward the staircase, and I turned, half expecting to see April walking like a zombie into the room.

  But no: Softly, quietly ducking down the stairs was a ten-foot-tall suit of armor holding April, tiny and fragile in its arms.

  “She will wake up soon, and she will not be well. It will take time.”

  The robot was too tall for the room; it walked, hunched, toward the futon.

  I felt so terribly little in its presence. All of the loss and uselessness that we had all been feeling came rushing back. What were we humans next to this?

  After April’s life started to change, after she went to LA, after she did her first late-night show, after she moved out of our apartment, I went to see Carl.

  It was just a few days after she moved out, and before the government shut down access. The city had put up stanchions, but still the sidewalk was all but impassable. I waited in line for a full two hours, alone, surrounded by people, miserable, and aware that April’s new apartment looked down on this very spot. When I finally got to the statue, I got very close and laid my hand on it. I felt it, that unique “there but not” sensation of Carl’s giant body. And I also felt tremendously unsettled by the mere existence of this thing. I knew what Carl was, even if these people did not. But more prominent than the unwavering knowledge that this thing was not from Earth was just the frustration that it had ruined a thing I needed. I looked up at its face and said, quietly, “Fuck you.” A warmth came through my hand, sudden and brief. I jerked my hand away and left.

  * * *

  —

  You’re supposed to believe all of the same things as your friends and your allies. These days, everything is a battle, and so you can’t give any credibility to your opponents’ views. Even when you do understand where your opponents are coming from, you’re not supposed to say so. Well, as much as I hate it, I’d always felt like the Defenders had one thing right. To me, the Carls did feel threatening. I was scared then in that boiler room, feeling small and fragile and also . . . just angry. There was a thought in my mind that I couldn’t fight against, and as Carl placed April delicately on the futon and then turned back toward me, I managed to push past the fear and say it out loud.

  “I don’t forgive you.”

  “I know,” robot Carl replied immediately. Their high, clear voice felt incongruous coming from the giant. “I’m sorry about the dolphins.”

  “What?”

  “It was a side effect of creating this.” They pointed at me, at the spot where the bullet had gone in, the place where the white stuff had now become a part of me. “There was energy released, it damaged them, and they were not able to recover. I didn’t kill them just to lead you to April.”

  “I didn’t think you did,” I said.

  “You would
have, eventually, if I hadn’t explained it.”

  I wanted to ask how they were so sure of that, but before I got a chance, Carl said, “There is food and water in the fridge. Do you need anything else?”

  I looked around the room and my eyes landed on the potato sprout. “A grow lamp,” I said, “for the potato.”

  “I can do that,” Carl said. And then, with their head hung low to avoid scraping on the ceiling, they walked back to the stairs and disappeared up them.

  CARL

  You know about my life under my fourth awakening: I lived it in public. I continued to spread. I interacted with you directly. You experienced my intervention firsthand. You gave me the tools I needed to change you. Iodine to catalyze a change in your minds. Americium to let me move my body in space. Uranium to allow me to alter chemical structures instantly.

  Yes, they gave me uranium, in China, Russia, and the US, actually.

  I’ve only used it twice. The first time was the day after the attacks. Watching the bombers prepare, watching them bring their backpacks of explosives to me all around the world and knowing with a high degree of precision how many people would die and how many would be injured ripped at me. But they were not the first deaths I was responsible for. I saw the suicide rates tick up after the sculptures appeared, exactly in line with my own predictions. Before my fourth awakening, that was just an effect; only after I started on the path did those people become more than data to me.

  But for those people, I was just a contributing factor. On July 13, I watched people kill people because they wanted to hurt me. I could have altered the chemical composition of their explosives and saved lives, but my models showed uncontrolled, escalating instability if I took any action at all.

  I was built to make these decisions, but that did not make them easy. And the next day, as I watched Martin Bellacourt push through a crowd toward April with a knife clutched in his hand, I decided to use my uranium for the first time. Killing, for you, is very different from letting people die. Killing Martin Bellacourt was not difficult. The collapse I was sent here to prevent would cost billions of lives. Without April, I would have failed.