by Hank Green
I didn’t know how to choose, so I closed my eyes and selected something at random.
* * *
—
A shock of cold breeze hit my face, and I opened my eyes to find myself on the top of a snow-covered mountain. The sky was pure blue with only a few wisps of cirrus clouds in the upper atmosphere, and I could see pristine, snow-covered nature for miles in every direction. I realized I hadn’t been breathing, so I sucked in the cool air and felt it hit my lungs with a refreshing shock.
And then I realized I was moving, just a little bit, and I looked down to see that I was wearing skis.
“Oh shit,” I said out loud.
I was picking up speed, not sure how to slow myself down or turn away from going straight downhill. “Shit!” The hill in front of me looked shockingly steep, and the more I looked at it, the more I went toward it.
I tried to lean forward to go to my hands and knees, but that just sped me up and made me wobble. My skis began tracking away from each other and then my legs separated in a split and my hands and face slammed down into the snow. The cold and the pain bit into me. I tucked into a ball and tumbled and rolled until I finally came to a stop, and I could feel bits of snow melting against my skin where it had snuck down my back or up my sleeves.
“How is this possible?” I said out loud. There was no one to hear, so I just shouted, “WOOOOOOO!” and the noise traveled down the hill. I wanted to try a different sandbox and new experiences. I wanted to do it all day. I wanted to do it forever, and so would everyone else.
I didn’t try to ski anymore. I just sat on the mountain, breathing in the startling air and staring out at the perfect beauty of a world that was not real.
These sandboxes were not experiences, they were constructed spaces where you could be yourself and do things yourself.
Finally, I exited the sandbox and the Premium Space and found myself alone in the room.
I checked my watch. Only fifty minutes had passed.
The version of the Space we had at Altus didn’t have price tags, so my first thought was wondering whether and how they were going to monetize it. Naive, I know, but I thought maybe only certain kinds of content would be behind a paywall. Only entertainment or only porn or something. I think everyone’s second thought upon entering the Premium Space (after Holy shit, this is real) was Holy shit . . . porn.
I couldn’t keep focused—it was just too big. I imagine this must have been what it was like when the internet was first becoming a thing. Everyone knew everything would change, but no one had any idea how. What would society look like after ten years of Altus? How powerful would this company become? What would it do to our brains? What would it do with our brains? And even if all of this was perfect and not dangerous and carefully done, what about people who couldn’t access it, whether they were physically unable, like Peanut, or just couldn’t afford a headset? This was going to fundamentally change how people learned, and people with access would be able to learn very fast.
* * *
—
We’ve got two competing ideas inside of our heads: first, that all people have the same value because otherwise we’re immoral monsters, and then second, that some people are more valuable because they have access to more money or skills or knowledge. I’m not saying this is good; I’m just saying it’s a thing.
The only real way to bring these two ideas together is to give everyone an equal shot. That is, of course, impossible in like a billion different ways. But we try for it. Start out with public education for everyone. Try to make the quality of that education equal. Expand that to higher education. Take care of medical expenses so that isn’t dragging people down. Provide a safety net that prevents people from going to prison or starving because they don’t have enough money.
The Altus Space, it immediately seemed to me, could be a force that shared value widely and expanded access to opportunity. But it could also be a force that gave more opportunity to those who already had access. And if the company was headed for a trillion-dollar valuation, it had likely already chosen the worse path.
So that’s what I was thinking about when Peter Petrawicki walked back into the room and asked, “So what do you think?”
I answered honestly, “I think it’s going to change everything.”
“You’re definitely not wrong about that,” he said with all the confidence of a newly minted billionaire.
“I also couldn’t help thinking about how the hell it was done. I mean, I get some of it, I’ve been working on some of it. But we’re so far away from this—” I gestured to the headset. “And then it also seems like you’re building intricate sandboxes for playing around in, and I also want to know how the hell you’re doing that!”
I was legitimately curious about all of this, and felt all of the emotions of wonder and fascination I was showing him. I just tried to do everything I could to forget who he was and hide my worry.
“Well, that’s exactly what I want to show you.”
We left the little room behind, and then Peter and I walked farther down the empty hallway. There were photographs on the walls. I tried to look at some of them, but they were just landscapes I didn’t recognize.
He knocked quietly on one of the doors, and it opened to show a warm-looking library with some healthy-looking potted plants and a comfortable-looking leather chair. Sitting in that chair was a young woman, a little older than me, with bold eyebrows cresting over hazel eyes. Her most striking feature was her completely bald head, on which had been stuck a collection of electrodes.
“Aletha . . .” Peter walked up to the woman with his hand out. She shook it. “This is Miranda Beckwith. Miranda, this is Aletha Diaz.”
“Hi, Miranda,” she said, her English slightly accented. “Sorry for not getting up. It’s kinda a pain in the ass to do it once I get all hooked up.”
“No,” I choked out, “don’t worry about it.”
“I wanted to bring you here so you could see how this works firsthand. Aletha, what would you say your job is?”
“Basically, I read. I love reading anyway, and now I’m getting paid a lot of money to do it.”
“And while Aletha reads, we read Aletha. Miranda, it’s about time you understood what we really do here.”
I thought he was just going to keep going, but apparently he needed my approval so I said, “Yes . . . please.”
“When Carl came to our world, two big things changed. First, I believe when April pressed the iodine to Hollywood Carl, she triggered a change to her own mind that quickly spread to brains all over the world. But it never made sense to people studying this stuff. How was that alteration transmitted and, more than that, how was the Dream stored? It was the same for everyone, but it wasn’t in our minds before that. And it was massive! Imagine how much storage space something that large and detailed would require!”
None of this was new information for me, or anyone really, but it felt impolite to interrupt.
“A few people who were not happy about the Dream started to investigate it deeply, and something they discovered was that, if two people went to an area of the Dream that was completely unexplored at the same time, they would actually experience it slightly differently. But then, in the next twenty-four hours, a stable version of their experience would be settled on, and both would see the exact same thing from then on.
“That’s when we realized that the Dream was not only something Carl created. It was a framework, and we were filling in the details. And THAT,” he almost yelled, “was the second thing.”
I disagreed with his version of the story a bit, it hadn’t just been people who weren’t happy about the Dream who had figured this out, but I didn’t need to get into it with him, so I just said, “Yeah. People have known about that for a long time.”
He looked a little annoyed, but then he went on, “Well, what no one knows outside
of this island is where the information is being stored.”
Ah, I thought, yes, that is a big deal.
“It’s in everything,” he said, his eyes wide with wonder.
“It’s in . . . everything?”
“Everything alive. Before the Carls even changed our minds, they changed our world. They transformed every living cell on the planet into a tiny computer capable of storing a tiny amount of data and, more importantly, capable of transmitting data extremely rapidly. It’s like every tree has a trillion Wi-Fi routers in it. It’s mind-numbing. It’s terrifying. When the Carls left, they took the Dream, but they left their computer.
“Miranda, I’ll be honest with you, we don’t completely understand how it works. But their system reads information from people’s minds and moves it into other people’s minds. We didn’t have to build it; we just had to figure out how to use it. That’s what’s happening in Aletha’s mind right now. We activate the areas of Aletha’s brain that the Carls created to allow information to be transferred out of her mind and into their network. And then we send signals to your mind that call the information out for you to experience. Figuring out how exactly to do that was not easy, but we found a way.”
It didn’t escape my notice that Peter hadn’t told me exactly what that way was.
“So that’s how the Altus Space works?”
“And there’s more. We have commercialized this system.” He gestured to Aletha’s head. “Soon, anyone in the world will be able to create experiences for the Altus Space and sell them in an open market. We are going to make a lot of skilled and talented people very wealthy.”
If that was true, it was huge. It meant Altus could outsource content creation. They could be the YouTube of full-immersion VR. Someone could strap a rig to their head and go skiing or take a math test or have sex and sell that moment of their lives to anyone with a headset. And, I’m sure, the only currency you could use would be AltaCoin. I didn’t know a lot about business, but I knew when I heard an idea that could easily take over the whole entire world.
“So, I mean, not that I’m complaining, but why are you telling me any of this?”
“Because you’re leveling up, Miranda. This is your job now. You’re going to work in here. You’re going to be like Aletha, one of our clients, but you will be building sandboxes for Altus users.”
I am not bragging when I say that this sounded like a tremendous under-utilization of my skills. I had not been hired to make digital environments, I was a research scientist! Was this a punishment?
“Thank you, Aletha,” Peter said, and then he took me out of the room.
“OK, Miranda, one more thing to see!”
We walked down another ten meters of that long, chill hallway, and then, at the end, Peter opened a door. Light poured through it and I staggered back, not understanding what I was seeing. The room was huge and bright, maybe fifty meters on a side, and it was completely packed with hundreds of hospital beds. It looked like an emergency field hospital for a war or a pandemic. A few people were wandering around, their eyes staring straight ahead, ignoring us, maybe headed to the bathroom or to a lunch break, but most were lying in the beds with headsets strapped to their faces. They all looked local—dark hair and brown skin. Every one of them was wearing an Altus headset. Everyone had a bundle of wires snaking off from them into the floor.
“What . . .” I said.
“This is the server farm,” Peter said proudly.
I turned to him. He was not smiling, but his eyes had a terrifying glint of pride in them.
“What?” I said.
“AltaCoin is the world’s first cryptocurrency mined by the human mind. More efficient, and more available. Everyone will be able to be a part of this economy.”
Everyone who can afford a headset, I thought.
“Soon, we will make it so that everyone can mine in their sleep, but before then, we had to create an initial supply. So that’s what the server room is for.”
“But these are people,” I said, and the question was there for him to answer.
“Yes, employees. They are being taken care of. They are working for Altus.”
“Why haven’t I ever seen any of them around, though?” I asked, trying to make him see the same thing I was seeing.
“They live here.”
“Where?” I asked, wondering where we could possibly have a dorm that could house all of these people.
“Here,” Peter said.
It took a few moments to realize that when Peter Petrawicki said that they lived here, he meant . . . this room. They lived in those beds. I didn’t respond. Why was he showing me this? I didn’t know if it was illegal, but it was definitely indefensible. It was the kind of thing that you should not tell someone who you do not trust.
“I know what you’re thinking, Miranda. I know that this looks immoral to you. But you can’t change the world from the kiddie pool. Altus isn’t going to be a company; it’s going to be its own nation, its own world. We are going to give people what they have lost, what they need. For decades, humanity has had nowhere to expand to, but now we’re giving people a new horizon, a new frontier.”
That all sounded pretty gross, and I didn’t know what to say. Then he spoke again, and my stomach dropped through the floor.
“I’ve taken the liberty of having someone pack up your old quarters. Everyone who works in high security lives here. Let me show you to your new room.”
I let out a shaky breath, trying to control my panic, but we both knew the score. If someone had packed up my whole room, they knew about the phone; they had probably even seen my texts. I hadn’t been brought to this new place to work. I had been brought here to be held prisoner.
APRIL
When we walked out of the auditorium, hauling the first round of bags behind us, Maya and I were a little surprised to find that Derek’s pickup truck was gone and in its place was a white moving truck with its rear door lifted and nothing in the back except for a large wooden crate strapped to one wall. Apparently we had arrived on a Friday night, and now we were leaving late Sunday. It felt like it had been much longer. Carl crawled up on my shoulder to watch with me as two people, a man and a woman, stepped out of the van. I knew their faces, but it was dark and the context was off. Then again, my brain could do things now that it couldn’t do before, and suddenly I had access to all the data I needed.
“Jessica?” I asked, in shock.
“April! Oh my god!” She bent over and put her head between her legs for a moment and then continued, “I didn’t believe it was true, but it’s true!”
“What the hell is going on?” Maya said quietly, toward me and Carl.
“We were told that we needed to come up here and get you, so we just . . . did,” the man said.
“And Mitty!”
“I can’t believe you remember my name,” he said, laughing.
“It was a big day, but also, like, since . . .” I gestured at my face, though neither of them had made any sign that they’d noticed it. “I’ve been able to remember more or less everything that’s ever happened to me.”
This was something I was just figuring out, but yes.
“Can someone explain what’s going on?” Maya said, looking at Carl. But Carl was being quiet around Jessica and Mitty.
“We each got a book, a few months ago,” Jessica said. She still had the small fighter’s frame and the bright red lipstick. “It was a very smart book, and it had a lot of good ideas that have helped us a lot. With money, but also with some family stuff.”
Here Mitty picked up. “Yesterday, we both got another one. It told us to come up here and rescue April May and her friend and her monkey and her potato plant, and it looks like all of this is coming true. Except the potato. I’ll be disappointed if there isn’t a potato.”
Fucking Carl.
“Maya, t
his is Jessica, and this is Mitty—they were the ones who helped me on the day that Martin Bellacourt . . .” I faded out, not sure how to finish the sentence.
“Stabbed you in the back like the fucking bitch that he was,” Jessica filled in.
Maya actually smiled—it was hard not to like Jessica.
“Well, let’s load up,” Mitty said. “We were told to move quickly.”
“Are we going in . . . the back?” Maya asked, pointing at the empty back of the moving van.
“That’s what the book said. There’s more too. We’ll tell you about it when we get closer.” I looked at Carl. There was a twinkle of excitement in their eye that I did not like, but I didn’t ask them to explain.
We tossed all of our possessions into the back of the truck. Jessica and Mitty sat up front, and the three of us went in the back with the crate. The truck started to rumble. It felt unsafe without seat belts on, but Carl was in charge and they seemed to think it was fine.
“Where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise,” Carl said.
“OK, well, if you’re not going to answer that question,” Maya said, “answer this one. How come we can’t be seen by schoolchildren at this high school without risking death, but we can be seen by Jessica and Mitty? Are they just . . . better people?”
“No, it has nothing to do with who they are. This won’t be possible for me to explain in detail—would you like me to try to do it metaphorically?”
“Yeah,” she said, annoyed, “that would be fine.”
“OK.” The monkey sat with one of its feet crossed over the other, leaning toward Maya and me. The voice came louder to power over the road noise, but the tone didn’t change at all.
“You have millions of nerves sensing your surroundings, but you don’t feel a signal from any of them individually. How cold are you, where are you, do you need to stretch or yawn or sneeze? Those impulses are felt in aggregate. My brother and I are like that. We can see and feel, but if one nerve stops working, we have no idea, it’s too much data. We aren’t looking out of every eye and monitoring every camera. We have tremendous processing power, but the systems that make the data understandable are fairly opaque to us, just as your systems are to you. You don’t know how your body decides you have an itch. You just know you do, and you scratch it. If a bunch of people at this school noticed something weird, that would increase the chances that my brother would notice. As long as we stay off predictable paths and do not look exceptional, we should be fine.”