A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

by Hank Green

  Andy: Jesus, are you really talking about clothes right now?

  Robin: I’m just happy it isn’t just me and Andy in the group chat anymore.

  Maya: Or maybe the gray one with the maroon stripes. Less appropriate, but you gotta show those nerds how to look good.

  The messages continued from there, but I couldn’t read them. I just read Maya’s last two messages over and over again. There was no reason for her to bring up those two dresses. There was no way that she could even know about the second one. But there it was, on my phone, staring at me. The two dresses I’d worn the night I had sex with April.

  Christ.

  She’s with April, I thought. She asked April what she could say to let me know that April is alive, and that’s what April chose?!

  I like to think only nice things about people, especially people I love, most especially people I love who have been missing and presumed dead. But I will admit that among the jumble of very intense emotions I experienced in that moment, there were a couple unkind words that came to mind.

  I took a deep and shaky breath. Maya and April were . . . together. Did I feel something next to jealousy? Maybe. But mostly jealousy for connection. I was jealous of love.

  I was not in the right frame of mind to slowly vent fifteen condoms of hydrogen out my window that night, but that’s what I did.

  ALTUS-COMPATIBLE HEADSETS SOLD OUT WORLDWIDE

  Associated Press

  Despite escalating production throughout Asia, 8K VR headsets are unavailable anywhere in America right now. Walmart reports the last pair sold was in a South Dakota store more than five days ago. Since then, shipments have been delayed as demand in Asia has also spiked and headsets are being purchased for top-dollar prices there.

  The market in used headsets has ballooned, with compatible products selling at auction for as much as $15,000. This has also, led to fraud, with many older headsets being sold for top prices even though they do not have the resolution necessary to trigger the Altus altered state. Altus has said in a press release that they have reached ten million concurrent users in the US alone.

  MAYA

  After Carl told us that we were going to become a zoo exhibition unless we could “increase the probability of a stable outcome to above 50 percent,” the monkey hopped off the stage and held a smooth black rectangle out to me. In their hand, it looked like something from another world.

  “Your mom is worried about you.” The words were still coming from the PA system of the auditorium. “You should text her.”

  It was a phone. No, I realized, it was my phone.

  “Where did you get my phone?”

  Now the voice transitioned, coming instead from the smartwatch wrapped around the monkey’s neck. “I grabbed it when April threw it out the window.”

  April’s eyes widened. “How did you find us?”

  “Well, I’ve been in the back of your truck the whole time, so I didn’t actually need to find you.”

  A smile cracked April’s lips then, but I didn’t think any of this was funny.

  “You carried my phone with us that whole way! You let them track us!” I accused.

  “As I said, I can block him from tracking you, I just can’t block him from predicting where you might go. It has taken this much time for me to make it so that he won’t be able to track you if you text someone, but that is now done. Of course, you still can’t tell anyone where you are.”

  I looked down at the phone, my mom had indeed texted me. A lot. The last one was recent.

  Maya, text me when you get a chance to let me know you’re OK.

  “Oh, that’s bad,” I said.

  April leaned over to read it and said, “It is?”

  “Yeah, if she’s resorting to asking for texts, that means she’s desperate.”

  “Well,” April said, “it’s not like there was no reason to worry.” The emotions of her new face were sometimes hard to read, so at first I thought that was a joke and I didn’t think it was very funny. But then I saw the pain in her eyes. I had thought I was going to die, and so had she, and that puts a different light on everything. A bruise had spread out around the hole in my ribs, and while the pain seemed muted, it was always there. I had been shot. Let me say it for anyone who needs to hear it: There are too many guns in this fucking country.

  But there was no way I was going to tell my mom that I had been shot, but was fine, and would see her in a little while. I started writing, I’m sorry, Mama, I was on a long trip and my phone broke and I didn’t have a chance to get it fixed. I should have figured something out, but

  “Wait,” I said to Carl. “Can I tell her? Can I tell her that I found April?”

  Then I realized I was asking the monkey for permission, and I got a little angry.

  “Yes—but only your parents for now. If you’re worried about my brother, he, of course, already knows.”

  “Don’t, though,” April said.

  “Huh?” I asked.

  “Don’t tell her.” She hesitated and then said, “Can we go . . . back downstairs?” She was looking at Carl, not for permission but to make it clear that she wanted us to be alone.

  I sent the text to my mom, ending with but I’m actually doing really well, and then we went downstairs.

  “I don’t know if I can do it,” she told me as she sat on the futon.

  “You’re going to have to give me more than that,” I told her, already a little frustrated with her.

  “I don’t . . . want it to be . . .”

  Ah, OK, this I understood. I pulled a chair over so that I could sit down facing her. “You don’t want it to be real. April, for the last six months, everyone you love has had to live with a reality that they don’t want. We’ve had to move your stuff into storage and break your lease. We’ve had to watch as people talked about you like they know who you are—as they vilify you and deify you. Your parents have had to talk to like thirty different tax lawyers because no one knows whether or not to tax the estate of a millionaire who disappeared in a burning building. None of us wanted it to be real. It just was. And every tiny time we had to act like it was real, it got more real.”

  She was looking down at the floor, but I wanted to see her eyes, so I reached out and lifted her chin. I was getting more comfortable with her face. It was already starting to just look like her, especially like this, with her black hair spilling over it.

  “Here, in this boiler room, with just you and me and our potato plant and our alien monkey”—she smiled—“I like it too. But your real is real whether you deal with it or not. And your parents are real right now.” She started crying at this, but I had to keep talking. “And you don’t want to face that, how real the pain of this has been for them. But now you get to end it. It doesn’t even make your life worse, it just means you have to accept what you did. I know you can do that.” I held out my phone to April.

  “I’m going to go to the bathroom,” I said, knowing she would need to be alone.

  Five minutes later, I returned with a whole roll of toilet paper, knowing we’d both probably need it. She was holding the phone to her ear, saying, “I’m so sorry, Mama, I’m so sorry.” She was repeating it over and over again, crying but not sobbing. The sobbing I could hear coming from the other end of the line.

  “I’m really OK,” she said, looking up at me. “Carl took me and they rescued me and it took a long time for them to fix me, but I’m better now.” I knew April didn’t believe that all the way, but that didn’t matter.

  I sat down next to her and placed my hand on the middle of her back. I couldn’t hear the other side of the call. Her dad was talking; her mom was crying.

  After a while she sniffed and said, in a clear voice, “Maya is here with me. I’m not alone. We have a couple things we need to work out. We can’t see you now. If it wasn’t important, I promise I would be there.
” She paused for a moment and said, “No, I’m sorry, the internet isn’t good enough here for FaceTime. I’ll send you a photo of me and Maya. My face is . . . it’s a little different, because of the fire. But I’m OK. I’ll be OK. As long as I have you guys, I’ll be OK.”

  April May has done some buck-wild shit in her life. She has done big things and brave things and impressive things, but I was never prouder of her than I was right then when she told her parents that she needed them.

  “OK, I’m sorry I can’t see you now. But soon. And I’ll explain everything. And you’ll be proud of me, I promise.”

  They talked for a little while longer before she thumbed off the phone and then turned to me. Only half of her face was wet because only half of her face made tears. I reached out instinctively to wipe them away because that’s just who I am, and then she collapsed into me.

  “That was really hard,” she said.

  “I know,” I replied, wanting to say more but not wanting to mess up this moment.

  And then she let me go and looked me in the eyes and said, “What do you think of my face?”

  “You’re still beautiful,” I said, doing my best not to look away.

  “I need you to be honest.”

  “You’ve always been a realist about the way you look. A lot of the women I know, they’re beautiful and convinced they aren’t. You have the confidence with the beauty. It’s . . . attractive,” I said.

  “But?” April prompted.

  “But, OK, to be real with you, it’s a little . . . not scary. It’s intimidating . . . a little.”

  Her head tilted forward, her hair falling over her face. I fought to give her the space to talk, and eventually she did.

  “I was never proud of being beautiful,” she said. “I just knew it was a thing, and I knew it made people treat me a little differently. Maybe a lot differently sometimes. Sometimes I resented it, even. And then sometimes it was a tool, and at least it was useful.” Then she looked up at me and said softly, “But I don’t want to be scary.”

  “It’s not scary,” I said honestly. “It’s just . . . intense. Though with you looking at me through your hair like that, it’s also sorta adorable-puppy at the same time.” I smiled.

  She smiled too. Oh god. That smile. I wanted to kiss that smile.

  I was rescued by a monkey.

  “We need to start getting ready to leave this place. I have set up a new home in a suitably unpredictable location, and we need to go there now.”

  “Now like I’m going to get shot again, or . . .” I asked, only half joking.

  “Now like there are going to be about two hundred students in this building in four hours, and if they see you, my brother will know where you are and then, yes, someone will probably shoot you soon after that.”

  I guess I wasn’t even half joking.

  Internal Communication from Peter Petrawicki to All Employees

  Hello Everyone,

  This might come as a bit of a surprise to some of you, and as always I apologize that we have to be so secretive here at Altus, but eight days ago, Altus’s Open Access software was released publicly to the entire world. Anyone with access to a headset was able to find their way into the world of the Open Access Space that most of you are already so familiar with.

  First, we just want to thank everyone who worked extremely hard to hit this very aggressive launch target, and managed to pull it off entirely seamlessly. It’s an accomplishment that many did not think was possible, but we did it, because we are extremely good.

  Soon, the fifty users who have earned the most AltaCoin by selling objects they created will be given access to the Altus Premium Space. Very few of you even know about Altus Premium as it has been a highly protected project, but it is going to launch very soon. There isn’t really a good way to explain the Premium Space, but guess what, all of you will have access to the Premium Space on your existing headsets starting tonight between 9 P.M. and 6 A.M. Use of Altus Premium mimics the effects of sleep, so don’t worry too much about logging off.

  An additional note. Altus, having proved its technology in such a fantastic way, has just raised $2.5 billion in Series C funding that values the company at over $500 billion. This isn’t just the fastest a company has reached a hundred-billion-dollar valuation, we hit a half-trillion-dollar valuation faster than Facebook reached a billion-dollar valuation. Each of your hiring packages includes, at minimum, 1 basis point, meaning that each of you now owns a minimum of $50 million of Altus stock.

  Congratulations, this is a big day for our company, but it is also a big day for the future of humanity. Altus is blazing the path to an entirely new frontier, and when you open up the Altus Premium Space tonight, you will understand how significant the work we’re doing really is.

  We are going to have to work hard, maybe harder than the staff of any other company in the world, but we’ll do it because the impacts and rewards are greater than anything that has ever been created.

  I am honored to work with you all,

  Peter Petrawicki

  MIRANDA

  Part of me wasn’t letting myself believe that April really was OK. The hope had brightened, but also, maybe I had misinterpreted. What I felt more than anything was lost and alone. I wanted to be back with my friends, not with these people who I had to lie to every moment of every day. The fact that I was starting to like some of them only made it worse.

  Before I even got to my lab bench that morning, I was intercepted by Peter Petrawicki himself.

  “Miranda, exciting day, huh?!”

  I shot up, shocked by the timbre of his voice. He was talking almost like he was onstage. “Uh,” I managed, “yeah. That’s for sure.” I was doing my best to project the aura of an excited team member.

  “If it’s OK with you, I’m going to take you away from your work. I’ve got a few things I’d like you to see.”

  “OK,” I said, trying not to look too scared or too eager, though I was both of those things.

  Peter took me through the massive building, every person we passed giving him, at minimum, a big smile or a “Good morning, Mr. Petrawicki.” Soon, we were outside, headed away from the giant C shape of the main campus.

  “Are we going to the server farm?” He was walking a little ahead of me, no matter how hard I tried to catch up.

  “We are! But also, and this is a secret, it’s more than just a server farm. All of our most high-security projects are housed there.”

  “Huh! I’ve always wondered why it was so big!” I said.

  “We like to keep everyone guessing,” he said without turning back to look at me.

  Soon we were at the big, windowless cinder block rectangle. The building must have been at least twenty thousand square feet. A guard stood outside, a pistol visible on his hip. He turned aside for Peter, who hit the keypad and then pulled the door open.

  Inside was a desk, and behind that desk three doors were evenly spaced on the wall. We waved to the person at the desk and went through the door directly behind him. And then I found myself in a long hallway. It wasn’t like the rest of Altus: This hall had lush green carpet and dark wood-paneled walls, with molding on the floors and ceilings and framing each of the dozens of doors in the long, straight hall.

  “The first thing is in here.” He opened the first door on our right. Inside was a calm, cool room with a single recliner that I recognized from my first trip into the Altus Space. “I want to show you the Premium Space. I’m going to leave you in here and come back in around an hour. That should give you the idea.”

  Like I said, I’d been avoiding going into the Space. I make it a point not to subject my one and only brain to untested science. But Peter was watching; if I denied him, I might as well give up the whole ruse. But also, it was more than that. I needed to see what this thing was really capable of, even if it was just one
time.

  And so I went in and found out that the Open Access Space was basically nothing. If Open Access was Galileo’s first telescope, Premium was the Hubble. No more cobbled-together living space for you to hang out in instead of sleep.

  I was presented with two menus, Experiences and Sandboxes. I didn’t know what either of these things was, so I started out with Experiences. A submenu opened.

  ADVENTURE

  EDUCATION

  DISCUSSION

  MUSIC

  BOOKS

  RELAXATION

  I chose Education because that seemed on brand, and then eventually found my way to “Solving Linear Algebra Equations.” I’d never been a huge fan of linear algebra, but I had taken it, so I had a level of awareness of the topic, but also was definitely rusty.

  I selected it, and then I was inside of another person’s mind. I didn’t have control; I was them. I was holding their pencil, thinking their thoughts, feeling their teeth in their mouth. I was this man. And this guy’s understanding of row operations was way beyond my own. My consciousness still existed, observing his consciousness, thrilling at the feeling of experiencing someone else’s mind. This was possibly the biggest technological advancement in history.

  I was too overwhelmed with the experience to keep my mind on the math the first time, so I went through the same experience again so I could really feel it make sense—feel the concepts snapping into place, the satisfaction of succeeding at something difficult. I felt his flow—it was mine—and after those five minutes I understood how to solve systems of equations better than I had after a full semester of linear algebra. It was not explained to me; I felt what it was like in another person’s mind, and it became part of my mind.

  Holy shit.

  I was right that everything I had spent my working life doing up to this point was basically nothing in the face of this technology. Was it responsible or ethical? Absolutely not. Was it worth trillions? As long as it didn’t kill you. My mind was buzzing with the implications, but I only had an hour and I had to see what sandboxes were.