A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

by Hank Green

  We shifted around in the back of the truck as it made a turn, Maya letting her bag slide but holding on to Tater (which is what we had named the potato plant) with one hand. There were no seats for us, just our stuff and, latched to the side, a four-foot-high wooden crate.

  “Can your brother control people,” Maya said, “the way . . .” Then she looked at me and finished, “The way you can?”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “He can, but it is difficult. Operating a body is complex, especially if you have not spent time operating it. It takes time to get to know the body.”

  Maya looked concerned. I had no idea what was going on.

  “So, when you offered to use April’s body to drive us to the school, would you have had to learn then? Or . . .”

  “When you offered to do what?” I said, my heart speeding up.

  “I will explain. It is not sinister. It is not a broken taboo.” Even with the increased volume, it was a little hard to hear them over the noise of the road, so both Maya and I were leaning in.

  “When your bodies are unconscious, they can be used and manipulated to keep them healthy and safe. That is all I have done. And yes, April, I did it while you were unconscious, to use the bathroom, to eat food, to keep clean, to keep your muscles strong. I’m sorry, I know that it is creepy, but it was necessary to optimize your health and speed your recovery.”

  Somewhere inside of me I had already known this. There were no bedpans in that bar. My muscles looked more toned after months of unconsciousness when the opposite should have been true.

  Carl reached out their little hand to me, and despite myself, I took it. “I would never and could never use a human body to do something against its mind’s will. It is outside of my programming.”

  “I don’t know if I needed to know all this,” I said.

  “That’s why I didn’t bring it up. Patients are often upset hearing what doctors have to do to them while they are unconscious.”

  Maya shot me a look, then crossed her arms. I think she wanted me to be more pissed off at Carl.

  We traveled for a long time, the humming of the road indicating that we were now on an interstate. Then, after what might have been hours, Carl uncurled himself, stretched, and said, “It’s time for me to show you what’s in the crate.”

  OVER 50% OF LUXURY APARTMENTS NOW ON THE MARKET

  The New York Times

  The massive boom in construction of luxury apartments in the early 2010s was intended to capitalize on the billionaire class’s seemingly insatiable appetite for the high-rise lifestyle. But now, that growth is looking more and more like a bubble.

  “Many of these apartments were purchased not as places to live, but as investment assets,” said Margot Laurent, senior economist at the New York Real Estate Board. “As the economy has eroded, illiquid assets like apartments have been less desirable, which has left many apartments not just vacant, but perpetually for sale.”

  ANDY

  There’s a package in here for you,” Jason called. I mean, he probably did. I didn’t hear him. I was in the Open Access Altus Space building a tree so that I could put it into Breezy Spring Day. So far, I’d been able to hold on to my place in the top ten since launching, but that was only because I was working on building and marketing items like sixteen hours per day.

  I felt the muted thudding of Jason smacking my chest and sighed.

  “Exit,” I said, and I pulled off the headset.

  “You have mail,” he said, throwing a padded envelope at me. “Also, you look like shit.” He flipped the light switch on the wall.

  That was definitely true. I also had been outside for roughly the same amount of time I’d spent showering in the last three days, which is to say not at all.

  “Thanks, you look cute,” I said, blinking in the light. He walked out of my room, knowing I was probably going to go right back into the Space.

  Except I didn’t, because inside the envelope was a new volume of The Book of Good Times.

  It told me I needed to clean myself up because I would need to be prepared tomorrow morning to complete a series of increasingly bizarre tasks. It knew I was busy, it said, but it promised this would be worth it.

  Next thing I knew, it was 9 A.M., and I was standing in a $15M vacant apartment that was, apparently, owned by my good friend Josh Crane, who I was helping plan a party. I had no idea who Josh Crane was, but that’s what the book told me to say at the front desk of the building and it had worked.

  Once there, I unloaded the contents of my bag (a bunch of sandwiches and other food) into one of the two fridges. My anxiety hummed. This was someone’s home and I had broken in. Though the place didn’t really feel like a home. It was too perfect. Too clean.

  I walked around the four-bedroom apartment, ogling the views. It was fully furnished. The dining room table probably cost more than some American homes. Josh Crane had very good taste in art, or at least very expensive taste in art, so I was treating the place like a gallery when the elevator ding sent my heart into my throat. I wanted to run away, to hide, but this was what the book had said would happen, so instead I walked back to the landing.

  There were two people, a man and a woman, and they were pushing . . . well, a beautiful, massive birthday cake. It was four feet high, with pastel frosting. Or at least, it was made to look like frosting. I was fairly sure that it wasn’t a real cake.

  It was on casters, and it rolled smoothly along the gray-stained hardwood floor.

  “Um . . .” I said. “Do I have to sign, or . . .”

  “No,” the woman said with a big smile. “We have to go now.” It was only then that I thought for a moment I might recognize them.

  Once the elevator door was closed, with my heart thumping in my teeth, I walked forward toward the cake. Slowly, deliberately, the top of the cake hinged backward, and April May slowly uncurled to standing. My body almost stopped working. Her hair looked lank and dirty. Her skin—at least the part that definitely was skin—was pale and drawn. Her eyes, though, were bright, and she smiled like she was seeing something she needed to see.

  “Ta-daaaaa,” she said apologetically.

  A laugh and a sob simultaneously exploded out of me, and then I fell to my knees and put my head on the ground, not sure if I would be able to stay conscious. I heard an unfamiliar noise coming out of my mouth, just a long low groan. She was there next to me then, wrapping her arms around me. I looked up and saw April’s face—it was divided in two. My mind couldn’t make sense of it. And then Maya was there too. Had she been in the cake? And then there was a monkey, and then my vision blurred and I heard a rushing noise in my ears. I put my head down just in time to pass out.

  I woke up in a very fancy bed and turned to look out the window. I was, somehow, looking down on the Clock Tower Building, a building I had looked up at probably hundreds of times. The different perspective twisted my mind in a loop. I rolled out of bed to take in the view.

  I had to pee. I also had to have a whole lot of questions answered. I walked out of the bedroom and into a hallway, which led me to the kitchen and dining area, where Maya was sitting at a table.

  “Maya,” I said.

  She stood up and ran over to me, grabbing me tight and holding on. “What is going on?” I asked.

  “A lot. I don’t know where to start.”

  “Is April—”

  “She’s fine,” she interrupted, saving me from finishing the sentence. “She’s . . . a little different, but I think anyone would be. Her new skin . . . it’s just that, a prosthetic, because of the fire. It covers a lot of her body.”

  That made me wonder if they were back together. Had Maya seen April’s whole body? She saw me wondering that and punched me in the arm. “Jesus. No, we’re not back together. I need to hear some words I haven’t heard yet. I honestly don’t know where she
is on a lot of things. There hasn’t been enough time.”

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “She went to take a shower. We’ve been on the run and haven’t had a chance to get clean in a while.”

  And then a weight slammed into me from behind.

  “AGGGUHHH,” I said, looking down to see April’s arms, one her normal color, the other stony and white with iridescent flecks in it. I could feel the wetness of her hair on the back of my neck.

  “OK!” I said when the squeeze actually started to hurt. She let go and then came around to stand in front of me. She was wearing a thick, white, too-big bathrobe. I looked down at her, and she moved in again for a more proper hug. I tucked her head under my chin, and it fit perfectly, her wet, shiny black hair interlacing with the week’s worth of stubble on my chin and neck. Under the robe, I felt the reality of her body, soft and solid. My eyes were stinging with tears.

  I looked down at her. From her hairline, around her nose, and down through her jaw, the left half of her face shone like an oyster shell. I said the first thing that came to my mind.

  “Shit, that looks badass.”

  She punched me in the shoulder, which actually hurt a little.

  “I’ve heard you’ve been busy,” she said, and her voice was 100 percent April.

  I thought about that for a second and then said, “You planted a lot of seeds, I’ve had some gardening to do.”

  “Jesus, Andy,” she retorted immediately, “you do sound like a pastor. I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”

  I suddenly was. “I was told to bring food,” I said. “It’s in one of the two massive refrigerators.” I gestured over my shoulder.

  “It is really good to see you.” As she said it, we all heard the elevator softly ping in the other room. April and Maya looked at each other, eyes wide and brows knitted. “Is someone else supposed to be coming?” Maya said.

  When no one replied, she pulled a knife out of the knife block and then went and hid behind the kitchen island. I didn’t know what to do, so I joined her until I heard a voice say, “Holy s’moly.”

  It was Robin. I stood up and saw April holding him. His arms were wrapped around her. In his right hand he held a small leather-bound book.

  * * *

  —

  I know I’m not the first one to mention this, but I feel like I need to reemphasize that it is really weird to talk to a monkey and really weird to talk to a space alien computer program, but it’s, like, unsustainably weird to talk to both at the same time. But then, like everything, somehow you just get used to it.

  I didn’t want to let April out of my sight. It seemed like this new reality could pass into a dream with any shift in the wind. In that way, it felt a lot like what it was like when April was suddenly gone. Adjusting to a new reality just takes time, and your mind keeps looking for signs that the old reality was the real one.

  My brain was having an easier time with the talking monkey than it was with April being alive. It had happened! Everything since that “Knock Knock” had led me to this. I had done everything right.

  But as pleased as I was with my actions, I found myself dancing around my obsession with Altus. I knew I was doing the right thing by trying to get more information about how it worked, but also I didn’t feel like explaining to April that I was well on my way to being one of the first people in the world to get access to some deluxe experience championed by Peter Petrawicki.

  “Why do you think Altus is keeping the Space so exclusive?” April asked me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why aren’t they giving it to everyone? What’s the cost to them?”

  “Well, I don’t know. It must cost money to run, so maybe they need to sell access. They’ve built a massive office in Val Verde, and they took a lot of investment from extremely rich people that want their investment back, I guess,” I answered.

  “Neither of you are correct,” Carl spoke, for the first time in a while, through their smartwatch.

  “Yeah, I don’t love agreeing with the monkey, but you’re both not getting the point,” Maya added.

  “Your system is fueled by the creation and capture of value,” Carl said. “The goal is to capture as much value as you create, though in practice that is more or less impossible. Altus is creating false scarcity because they think that is the best way to capture the value they are creating—there’s no more to it than that. They’re just following the incentives of the system.”

  “But isn’t the point to create value?” April asked the monkey.

  “That is unclear.” They scratched the back of their little head. “Creating the value is what people publicly praise, but capturing value is what is actually rewarded. Altus is creating value, likely far more than it is capturing, at least right now. But your system does not have good ways of even recognizing the existence of value that is created but not captured.”

  We all looked at Maya.

  “Yeah,” she said, “that.”

  * * *

  —

  We had all finished snacking by then, so we moved to the giant living room. Robin and I couldn’t stop looking down at the precipitous views of the city.

  I plopped onto the couch. It was a beautiful cool, soft, mottled-gray leather, but somehow not particularly comfortable. And that’s where I was sitting when we went all the way down the rabbit hole.

  “The situation we’re in, if you’ll allow me to summarize”—April gestured at the monkey, and they dipped their head forward—“is that an advanced intelligence determined that we will very likely destroy ourselves sometime in the next couple hundred years and sent an envoy to attempt to set us on a better path. That failed, and so now that envoy has been replaced by another . . . I dunno what to call it . . . entity, I guess, that is going to, instead of nudging us into a better course, control every individual human’s decisions. We don’t know how that entity is going to do it, but we do know that it probably has something to do with Altus . . .” The monkey raised their hand here, and April paused.

  “It may be that Altus is part of the intervention—I can’t know—but I do know that Altus’s existence makes it extremely likely that you will eventually destroy yourselves without intervention.”

  “How?” I asked, getting a little nervous about what I’d already been hiding from Maya and April.

  “It is not simple. You will create simple narratives as it happens, but they will all be incorrect. The largest affecting factors will be tremendous concentration of power in the hands of fewer and fewer people, who will then destabilize the world to protect that power, large-scale isolation caused by easy alternatives to community and society, and a change in the speed of transfer of information that will be too rapid for norms and taboos to prevent it from being used maliciously.”

  “That sounds . . . familiar,” Maya said.

  The monkey seemed to smirk. “All of this will make you less able to handle unlikely but ultimately inevitable catastrophes. Especially if they compound. A war on top of an unstable climate on top of a pandemic, for example.”

  “Why are you telling us this?” I asked.

  “Because if my brother has his way with you, it will be a catastrophic loss for the galaxy.”

  Robin’s eyes widened and he said, “Your . . . brother?”

  “Yes, we are siblings.”

  “Shouldn’t your”—I had to think about what I was going to say—“your loyalty be to your own people?”

  “You are my people. I don’t know who created me. Based on the data given to me, systems like yours tend to be short-lived. Ultimately, all beauty is transitory, but there’s no choice except to believe it is worthy. I am still doing what I was created to do. Allowing my brother to destroy your beauty would be contrary to my programming.”

  I mulled that over for a while, and then April took back over.
<
br />   “So, we all agree with Carl. Humanity shouldn’t become the beloved pet of a planet-wide conscious infection. But the only way to prevent that is to change the world enough that we probably will not destroy ourselves. And the best way to do that is to make Altus not exist anymore. Andy, how do you feel about that?”

  I was caught a little off guard, worried why she thought I was the right person to ask.

  “Um . . .” I didn’t even know what the Premium version had in store, but I was deeply attached. “It will be extremely hard because the people who are using Altus’s service love it a lot. Even if we destroyed their whole system, I think people would rebuild it,” I said, trying to sound like I wasn’t one of those people.

  “How would you feel if we destroyed Altus?” Maya asked, seeing deeper into me than I would maybe have liked.

  “I’m not sure if we can,” I hedged.

  “We must,” said Carl.

  And then Maya, April, Robin, and Carl were all looking at me. Every one of them showing me some mix of hope and fear and frustration.

  “Andy,” Robin said, his voice strong.

  I looked from him to April and saw an anger there I hadn’t expected.

  Maya took over, seeing the dangerous ground we were on before I did. “Peter Petrawicki and Altus are not two different things. I understand looking at things from thirty thousand feet or whatever, and understanding the magnitude of the challenge is great, but Altus isn’t salvageable. It’s rotten to the core.”