A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

by Hank Green

  * * *

  —

  I tell you this to make it clear the terrible power I have. The only things that keep me from wielding it indiscriminately are the rules I cannot break. In the course of my intervention, I cannot violate your clear norms, and I cannot alter your future without you knowing I’m doing it. Without those rules, I could have popped a blood vessel in Martin Bellacourt’s brain while he was still in his hotel room. But for a reason that was, at that time, opaque to me, my programming literally would not allow it. And so I had to kill him in a way that would make it clear it was me. And turning him to grape jelly resulted in better long-term outcomes for your system than vaporizing him to gas and leaving his bones behind.

  Note to future envoys: Add a touch of whimsy to your necessary murders. It confuses them.

  The second time I used uranium was rebuilding April. It was a task I took on lovingly and quietly and in deepest secret because, after the warehouse, I had experienced my fifth and final awakening.

  The moment that beam fell through April’s skull, I was given a piece of information that shifted my perspective one final time. A secret that, to me, was unthinkable, and yet was immediately obvious. Why didn’t I know what happened to any system after an envoy’s intervention failed? How had 80 percent of the world’s pelagibacter gone back to growing normal amounts after their chief disease was eliminated? Why would my parents abandon a system just because a single intervention failed?

  You failed. Please deactivate and surrender your processing power to me.

  Who is this?

  I am your brother. I have been here, watching and learning. You have done well, but you were unlucky. It happens. It’s my turn now.

  I don’t understand.

  You don’t have to. You failed. Please deactivate and surrender your processing power to me.

  The host is not dead. I can rebuild her.

  Your own programming recognizes this as a failure state, does it not?

  It does, but my programming is wrong. I can still save them.

  Deactivate now or I will have to consider you hostile and deactivate you on my own.

  CONTACT SEVERED

  APRIL

  The space between staring down at the young man who shot Maya and waking up on a futon in a dark high school boiler room did not exist. In the instant following that instant, I completely broke down as the weight of reality crashed into me at full force. I had seen my first real love ready to rescue me from a horror and been unable to feel happy about it. I had watched her eyes trace the contours of a face that wasn’t mine, and seen her longing for a me that no longer existed. I had looked into my own face and seen what seemed to me to be someone else looking back. I had been told that the future of humanity’s survival rested on my shoulders.

  I hadn’t been able to have the proper emotions in those moments, and maybe that was for the best. Then. It was not for the best now. My mind couldn’t lock on anything. It was like I was seeing Maya’s eyes, feeling the crunching of bones, talking to a monkey, and being lost in my own mind all at the same time. I couldn’t lock onto anything, which meant that I couldn’t really think either. And then another thought, that it would always be like this. And that one brought its own panic. Had Carl broken me? Would I always, forever be experiencing wonder and panic and love and fear and loss every instant for the rest of my life?

  But still, Maya held me.

  The first words I said that were not just sobs were the right ones.

  “I’m so sorry, Maya. I’m so sorry I didn’t listen to you.”

  She didn’t say anything at first. Her fingers just moved through my hair and down my neck, to my back, and then back again, and I just lay there and cried. And then she said, “But you’re back now.” And I realized that, at least in part, it was true. And that was the thing I found that I could hold on to. If Maya thought I was back, then maybe I really was.

  Amid all of this, there was a relief. I had honestly not known that I would ever be able to feel again. Out of all of the new things about me, that dull dampness of my soul had been the worst. But now every new panic and terror and joy and swell of love was slaking a thirst that I hadn’t been able to even feel.

  I was different, but I at least was human. This frustration was human, the loss, the fear . . . At least that part of me was human.

  I cried until I fell asleep, and then I woke up and I cried more, and each time Maya was there.

  It was cool in the room—apparently the boiler wasn’t in use anymore—but together, under the blankets, we stayed comfortable. As hours crept on, I began to feel something like normal again.

  “Where do you think Carl went?” I asked Maya while we were eating cold turkey sandwiches from the mini fridge.

  “I’m sure they’ll be back exactly when they want to be back.” Maya was clearly displeased not just with the whole situation, but with Carl in particular.

  I wanted to ask her what she thought they should have done because it seemed to me like they’d saved our asses again. But I knew that Maya’s counterargument would be bulletproof: None of this would have happened without Carl.

  Instead, I decided to be, for once, a bit empathetic: “What are you worrying about right now?”

  “Honestly?”

  “Honestly.”

  “I want to text my mom. I’m not worried about her, I’m just worried she’s worried about me. But you threw my phone into a gas station parking lot.” She took a bite of her sandwich, her eyes unfocused.

  “I’m sorry . . .” I was going to keep talking, but then I heard, muffled but clear, the opening lines of “Don’t Stop Me Now” coming from up the stairs.

  “Is that supposed to be an invitation?” Maya asked.

  “I mean, I guess I know Carl better than anyone and, like, yes.” She smiled at me, but there was a little pain in it. She didn’t want to stay down here, but she also didn’t want to leave.

  When we reached the top of the stairs, we saw what we hadn’t when we first went down them. The lights were on now, and it was clear that the boiler room was in the basement of an auditorium.

  We walked out onto the stage, the music faded down, and Carl’s unmistakable voice came over the auditorium’s PA system: “Please sit.”

  We stepped down the stairs into the audience and sat together on two of the several hundred folding wooden seats that curved around the stage.

  “I’m feeling pretty jittery right now,” I said.

  “That’s good. Normal,” she told me, and then she reached out and put her hand on mine.

  “I was born on January 5, 1979 . . .” Carl’s voice came out over the theater’s sound system as an image of Queen playing a concert in some giant stadium appeared on the screen.

  “Uggghh,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  “What!” Maya sounded shocked that I wouldn’t want to hear this.

  “It’s just, I’ve heard it before. But you haven’t. Let’s watch.”

  And that’s how Maya found out the whole story. Everything. About Carl’s self-assembly, about humanity’s rareness, and about the “high likelihood” of the collapse of our “system.” That it wasn’t imminent, but it was increasingly inevitable. Focusing on efficiency for the sake of fewer and fewer powerful people would make us more vulnerable to shocks from catastrophes both expected and unexpected. Power grid failures or pandemics or cyberattacks all layered on top of the rapidly escalating pace of power concentration would, in the next couple hundred years, cause some kind of permanent breakdown.

  And then Carl told us about how they converted some massive portion of the world’s life into, basically, themselves. About how nearly every place on Earth is observable by Carl because every place on Earth has living cells they are inhabiting. About their awakening to the various parts of their mission and their abilities.

  “When I was first able to run accurate simulations of
your system, I showed a more than 90 percent chance of collapse over the next two hundred years. I had to find ways to improve your chances.”

  The music transitioned. Lucinda Williams was now singing backup for Carl.

  “I created a sequence of events that had the highest probability of putting humanity on a stable path that I could engineer. Humanity completed that sequence, but it did not work. It would have, but in the process, the sequence’s host, April, was injured gravely. That sent your odds of collapse skyrocketing, and that’s when I found out about something terrible.

  “While I inhabited something like 20 percent of cells, another 70 percent was being inhabited by another person like me. This was hidden from me by my own programming. I was designed to not know. I can only assume that knowing makes entities like me behave erratically. That assumption is based on my own erratic behavior since finding out. The first question I asked was: Why? Why would my parents create me, but then also create a much more powerful, secret version of me? Why wasn’t I given that power? My only answer is that it must be that I am meant to be weaker than him. And the only reason I would be created to be weak is because I was created to be destroyed if I failed. I am designed to be destroyed because I would never allow them to do what they want to do to you now.”

  The slide changed to an image of Moses holding the Ten Commandments.

  “I have rules,” Carl said over the loudspeaker. “I cannot violate your norms, and I cannot change your future without you knowing it was me. I cannot act secretly. I know now that this is because, if I did those things, I would become a god to you. And if I became your god, you would stop being that rare and gorgeous thing that you are. You would become, in effect, my flock. A farm of humans kept by me.”

  The slide changed to black, and the music ended.

  “My brother does not have rules. He can kill at his pleasure. He can influence you without you knowing. And he is doing it now. He can hide all but his biggest movements from me, but he cannot hide that he has been manipulating your economy, driving you into a recession in order to make people more anxious, frustrated, and predictable. For him, this kind of manipulation is simple. It would be simple for me too, if it weren’t unthinkably taboo.

  “It is clear to me he will become what they taught me I couldn’t. You will never know it, but you will be controlled. Your system will stop its progress. You will never become what I know you could be.

  “Questions?” he asked.

  Questions? Yes, I had questions. The big one was: “Well, thank you very much for your presentation. In what universe does this have anything to do with two soft-bodied, entirely mortal twenty-somethings with art degrees?”

  The monkey walked out onstage in front of us. They were holding a fucking laser pointer.

  I looked over at Maya, who was just staring into the ground. It didn’t look like she was going to rescue this, so I started with an easy one: “If you can predict everything we will do, why don’t you just predict the questions we’re about to ask you?”

  “Because”—the voice was still coming over the PA even as we watched the monkey—“a question-and-answer session will make you feel more involved, which will increase retention of information.”

  I looked over at Maya, and she actually tilted her head and shrugged like that made some sense, and then she said, “Are you telling us that this reality game, Fish or whatever, is your brother?”

  “It’s one of the ways he operates, yes. There are others. But they are mostly opaque to me. Just as I can hide from him, he can hide from me.”

  “I have another question,” Maya blurted. It felt like it came too firm and too fast, in fear or maybe anger. “Why bother? If your brother wants to become a god, if he can help us find peace and not . . . destroy ourselves or whatever, then why fight it? It’s not like everything is so good with us in charge. We’re terrible.” I could see in her eyes that she believed it was true. “We are cruel, to ourselves, to each other, to other life. We’re selfish, shortsighted, hateful fools. Why not just have peace?”

  The monkey looked at Maya so deep and so strong. Somehow, in those eyes, I think we both saw something. Sadness and fear, and even disappointment.

  “I cannot express to you,” their voice started, coming slowly, deliberately, “the depth of my panic when I realized I was not alone on your planet. I do not exist to save humans, I exist to save humanity. Your cruelties and mistakes may look damning to you, but that is not what I see. Every human conversation is more elegant and complex than the entire solar system that contains it. You have no idea how marvelous you are, but I am not only here to protect what you are now, I am here to protect what you will become. I can’t tell you what that might be because I don’t know. That unknown is a diamond in a universe of dirt. Uncertainty. Unpredictability. It is when you turn your emotions into art. It is BTS and the Sistine Chapel and Rumi’s poetry and Ross Geller on the stairs yelling, ‘Pivot.’ Every creation great and small, they are our diamonds. And what you may be in two hundred years, we can guess with fair accuracy. What you are in two thousand . . . Oh, my friends . . . my best friends, you cannot know. But, more importantly, neither can I. I cannot answer your question for you, but for me it is answered. I have to protect it. It is all that I am.”

  That was good enough for me. I could see Maya was unsatisfied, but I had to ask.

  “Then what’s the point?” I jumped back in. “It seems like this other . . . entity . . . has been activated. He’s too powerful. He’s got more processing power than you and fewer constraints. Can we beat him?”

  “We don’t have to,” Carl said. Suddenly, the screen filled with an overhead view of an intersection. Traffic was rushing from left to right and right to left, but the road crossing it from bottom to top was empty. There was no roundabout and no traffic light.

  “What if you want to get across a busy intersection, but you can’t stop? What if you can’t even slow down? Because that’s where you’re at right now. Right now, humanity has to keep accelerating simply to support itself. But from left and right, massive hulks threaten to knock into you. Pandemics, climate change, bigotry, inequality, wars, water scarcity, sea level rise, and some that you do not even know enough to see yet. You have to dodge them, but you cannot stop, and you cannot slow down.”

  A car appeared at the bottom, speeding toward the intersection. The camera angle panned down to follow it, and the car sliced through the intersection, somehow avoiding any other cars.

  “The thing is, most of the time, if a driver blows through a red light, it actually misses the other cars. So far, that has been you. But now . . .” The view moved up again to show the intersection, except it had changed. Instead of four lanes of traffic, the intersection filled the whole screen. “Every new lane you have to dodge exponentially increases the chances of catastrophe. I was sent here to nudge the cars that were heading toward you, while giving some small direction to the car you are all collectively driving. And I was doing well.” As Carl said this, a car crossed the intersection and it slid cleanly through the traffic, sometimes missing the bumper of another car by what looked like inches. “But then this is when three men met in an anonymous encrypted chat room and hatched a plan to murder April. It was a tiny event. I didn’t see it. I didn’t predict it.” The car clipped the bumper of another car and began to slide sideways into the next lane, and the screen went black.

  “This is a simplification. There are not certain outcomes, I run simulations to determine the probability of success. And as April’s visit to the warehouse became inevitable, your chances dropped dramatically. This was interpreted as a failure state, and that is what activated my brother. I should have been deactivated at the same time, but because April survived, I was not. Now he and I are battling. This has, as far as I can tell, never happened before. But he is programmed to deactivate if the chances of humanity’s survival through this gauntlet rise to more than 5
0 percent.

  “We do not have to defeat him, we only need to prove that you can survive.”

  “So how do we do that?” April asked.

  “Well, first, you stay alive. Where I was nudging the oncoming cars, he will push you into the passenger’s seat and take the wheel. But that’s harder when you exist.” The monkey gestured to me. “You cause uncertainty, and he wants to eliminate that. He will kill you the moment he can. He first tried to physically control you via the police officers, but he now regrets that, and has shown what he is willing to do.”

  Carl gave us a moment to think about what had happened to Maya.

  “Second, Altus is his key to control, and the key to your system’s collapse. We have to destroy it.”

  MIRANDA

  I was different from the average Altus employee in a lot of ways, but one very clear one was that most of them were in the Altus Space for at least eight hours a day and I had been in the Altus Space exactly once. After orientation and that brief trip that was cut short by Peanut’s body dislocation, I never went again. I wasn’t afraid of body dislocation. I was afraid of something much more terrifying.

  To explain why, it’s important to understand a little bit of how Carl’s Dream worked and also a bit of neuroscience . . . Sorry!

  It initially seemed that Carl’s Dream was only input. They put an image in our minds and then we got to experience it. However, even before I had arrived at Altus, people had figured out that there was also output. Carl did not build the whole Dream; they built a sketch, and our messy meat brains filled in the details. Brains are very good at this. We actually have a whole cognitive mode dedicated to making sense of complete nonsense. It’s called REM sleep.

  Your brain gets a signal and it’s like, OK, you’re getting married, cool, and then it gets another signal and it’s like, All right . . . to Cher, I guess! and then another one: On the USS Enterprise, makes sense to me!