A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

by Hank Green

  Example: People like me have a habit of saying, “The problem is fossil fuels, we need to stop burning so many fossil fuels!”

  But, also, people like me have a habit of being pretty stoked when we get to take a private jet to the Caribbean. More importantly, if we just stopped burning fossil fuels right now, a bunch of people would die of cold or heat or hunger or not being able to get their medicine very, very quickly. The problem of climate change is not simple.

  My problem was that I was imprisoned inside my own mind and could not share vital information with the outside world.

  Step Two: Understand Your Assets.

  This sounds like money, and to some extent it is. But it’s also every piece of equipment you have and everything you know and are good at, and also, critically, everything that other people know and are good at, as long as you can convince those people to help you. My assets were entirely me. I had no outside connection; if I did, my problem would have been solved. So I just had what was in my own head.

  Step Three: Understand Your Limitations.

  People always skip this one too, but a solution that does not allow for real-world constraints is a bad solution. My limitations were . . . abundant. But limitations are also sometimes your own interests or values. Sometimes you don’t want to solve a problem in a way you won’t enjoy. Sometimes you know you only have a certain number of dollars or hours to spend and don’t want to spend any more. Limitations are fine, as long as you understand them.

  Step Four: Stir.

  Put your problem, your assets, and your limitations in your head, and shake them together until something falls out. In my experience, bad problem solving almost always comes from either not understanding one of these three things deeply enough, or just completely ignoring one or two of them.

  This handy guide will also help you when no solution is presenting itself: You need to rework the problem with new inputs. You reimagine the problem, search for new assets, or try to adjust your limitations. If it still doesn’t work, do it again. And again. Find someone who can add to your asset mix, narrow the scope of the problem, and if that doesn’t work, eventually you give up.

  It’s OK to give up sometimes.

  But not this time, because I was on to something, and I didn’t get there by focusing on smaller, more manageable pieces of the problem. I did it by going bigger.

  See, being in a mind prison was a big problem, but it was not the biggest problem.

  Altus was a miserable, terrible, immoral thing, and it was gathering a huge amount of power and had to be destroyed. And if I wanted to fix that problem, I needed to think much bigger than just “How do I get out of here?”

  Altus had kept me working. I could only guess why, but I could actually “enter the Space” and continue building the sandbox that I had been assigned. My guess was that they wanted to be able to tell people that I was “working” for them while I was imprisoned, and this would strengthen their case. They would just tell people I was lying about being held against my will, I guess.

  While I did my busywork, I kept looking for new assets, trying to reimagine the problem, and waiting for something to fall out. Something had to fit, because I could not accept that failure was an option.

  * * *

  —

  The goal of big American business is to monopolize everything. Amazon started out with books, but then they moved into every kind of shopping one could imagine, and then also audiobooks, and a streaming video platform, and in-home artificially intelligent butlers.

  The goal is to lock every single person into one platform—to own them from sunup to sundown, to know everything about them and monetize their every thought. Altus took that beyond the biggest, sweatiest dream of even the most delusional Silicon Valley billionaires. You didn’t even need to leave to sleep! Aside from the frustrating needs of the body, you could live your entire life there. Your home, your work, your learning, your life could be in the Space. The only thing it didn’t have . . . and I wasn’t sure if this was good (because it meant people would have to leave) or deeply dystopian (because I’m not sure if they would) was social interaction.

  The system Carl created and that Altus had hacked into just didn’t allow socializing. You could inhabit other people having social interactions, but you couldn’t have one of your own. What did that mean for the human race? I don’t know, but it seems like the kind of thing you’d want to do some science on before you converted the entire economy to it.

  But instead it was being done by a company that thought nothing of converting humans to a cryptocurrency server farm and imprisoning a dissenting employee in her own mind. But what was going to stop them? They had their own country, their own currency, and an IT infrastructure that spidered through the Earth’s very ecology.

  Me. I was going to stop them. Because I added new assets and widened the scope of the problem and I tossed it around. I thought of nothing else, and then, finally, something fell out.

  MAYA

  DAY ONE OF NINETEEN

  Somehow I’m the one who gets this chapter. After we’d uploaded the video, we still had a lot of hours before the morning when we were planning to make it public. There was too much stress and worry, too much tension for sleep to come easily. And also, April had been . . . open with me. She’d been vulnerable. She had also been thoughtful, and she’d said a lot of things I’d only dreamed of her saying.

  Everything felt too important to just turn on Queer Eye and zone out, so instead, I caught myself just staring at April while she stared at her phone. Her body was different and the same. She moved the same, but still you could sense the new power in her. And the set of her jaw wasn’t the same either. There was tension there, all the time. And in the little spot between her eyebrows, right where the new skin and old skin came together, was a little crease that almost never went away.

  I tried not to look too much at the parts of her that were new, but they were hard not to focus on.

  “It’s OK, you can look at me,” she said, looking up from her phone, where she had been texting someone. Probably her parents.

  “You’re beautiful,” I said.

  “But I’m also interesting, I know. I’ve stared and stared. It’s gotten less weird,” she said, “a little.”

  I traced my fingers down the fabric of her shirt on her left side, from her ribs down to her hip. It was all new skin under there. “Can you feel that?” I asked.

  “It feels good,” she said, her voice tight, like she was terrified to say anything else.

  This was a decision for me. But it also wasn’t. April had never hurt me just to hurt me, and that mattered. But she had known she was hurting me and done it anyway. I had watched her destroy herself for attention. And here was this small woman, as soft as water, as strong as iron, with the responsibility of the world crashing down on her every moment, just sitting there texting her mom.

  But it wasn’t the strength that I loved. It wasn’t the growth or the change or her face. I loved April. The decision I made was to stop denying myself that love out of spite or fear. I was done holding back.

  I flattened my hand out and tucked it under her shirt, feeling the seam where the new skin met the old skin on her back. And then I pulled her into me.

  She tasted like April.

  We went slow, remembering each other’s bodies. It was the best parts of something new all mixed with the best parts of something comfortable. Even the clumsiness felt like a dance. I had been falling for months, and she caught me.

  Afterward, I felt more than ever that April was still April—maybe she had been taught a couple of lessons, but she was still as bold and wild and smart and stupid as the day we met.

  Sleep came quickly for her, almost like there was a switch in her brain. But for me, what with the species-level-threat anxiety, it did not.

  So I took out my phone. April was
the social media icon, but I’m not immune to the scroll.

  I wanted to know more about Altus. What I found was . . . a lot. The Premium Space was now open to thousands, and those people had plenty to talk about.

  One of them was a YouTuber who played video games very well but also was known for having opinions loudly. I popped in my AirPods and watched his video.

  “This is going to change everything,” he said in a clear, authoritative British accent. “This is like the internet times a thousand. I know that I usually am just on this channel to joke around, but this is . . .” He seemed at a loss for words before there was a cut and he continued: “The Premium Space isn’t just about what you can make and sell and build. They’ve found a way to capture the experiences of other people and let you replay those experiences in your head. You think their thoughts, feel their emotions, and live inside of their bodies. You can understand someone completely. We have been searching for a solution to the division that the internet has created, and this might just be it. To truly understand your enemy is maybe to no longer have enemies. Can you imagine? Not just that, but the possibilities for education. You can learn through someone else’s understanding. I know the Premium Space is only open to a few people right now, I’m sure there’s lots of testing to do. I can’t imagine how difficult this is to pull off, but I’ve been inside the Premium Space for less than an hour and it has already changed my life. And I’m sorry this video is so short, but I need to go back in. I need to see how far this stretches.”

  My skin was crawling. I was thinking about Kurt “You Can’t Joke About Anything Anymore” Butler, and whether people like him would work to understand me or if I would be asked, once again, to understand people like him. Call me a pessimist, but I think if bigotry could be solved by access to more information, it would have been solved by now. Hate isn’t about a lack of understanding; it’s about hate.

  I ached with anxiety.

  Powerful people always thought they had the solutions. What they couldn’t see was that their power was, itself, the problem. “If only we could truly know each other” is a nonsense argument because, even if Altus lets you truly know one mind, there are billions of minds and you simply don’t have the time. And what’s going to keep you from just visiting the minds you find most comfortable? This felt like an old story, and once again, no one was going to listen.

  I looked at April, breathing softly beside me.

  Except maybe her, I thought.

  I reached my arm across her rib cage. She stirred gently beneath my arm and made a little noise. Jesus, I love her so much.

  I couldn’t help pulling her to me even more tightly.

  “What’s even holding us together?” she asked me.

  “Love,” I said. “I guess it’s been love the whole time.”

  And then, because I guess she couldn’t help herself, she said, “Also our arms.”

  I laughed so hard and suddenly felt so safe.

  * * *

  —

  “April,” I said, turning around to face her, “I want you to be my girlfriend.”

  “OK,” she said. “I love you.”

  Just like that, after all this time. I propped myself on one elbow, and I almost made a joke of it, but then I saw her eyes.

  “I love you too.”

  I reached around her and she nestled her head into my neck. Our bodies pushed together, warm and human.

  April May

  @AprilMaybeNot

  I’m sure there are going to be a lot of questions but first I’ll just say, it’s nice to be back. Here’s a video: youtube.com/watch ?v=U1dirHGODpM

  45.8K replies 2.3M retweets 8M likes

  Janice Ashby

  @PresidentAshby

  @AprilMaybeNot My personal relief, and the relief of the nation, at this news is immense. Thank you, as always, for your voice in . . . interesting times.

  52K replies 36.9K retweets 658.5K likes

  Tyler Oakley

  @TylerOakley

  @AprilMaybeNot GIRL! Welcome back! Come to LA, old-school collab. Let’s eat weird candy and I’ll catch you up on the gossip.

  130 replies 5.1K retweets 23.6K likes

  Francisco

  @Fahm90

  April May is “back” and of course I’m happy she was not killed, but I think there are a lot of questions that are not getting answered, and I think it’s important that we start asking them.

  4.3K replies 1.2K retweets 6.5K likes

  Death BoY

  @MrDeathLad

  Lefty-twitter is creaming itself over April coming back as if she hasn’t proved exactly what she is. We all said she was a traitor to humans and maybe not even really a human herself, and now look at her. Nothing will convince these people.

  351 replies 4.3K retweets 16.4K likes

  MAYA

  DAY TWO OF NINETEEN

  Finally, after thinking and talking and fretting, we made the video public.

  The world changed and it didn’t.

  The comments and tweets of support and love flooded in. Everyone from the president of the United States to Howie Mandel was in April’s mentions. The direct replies to April were almost all extremely supportive, but out there, almost immediately, we were seeing little quiverings of frustration and angst from the people who wanted to capitalize on people’s natural fear of April.

  The worst thing about these people is that they didn’t usually feel fear themselves; they were just using it to get attention and grow their influence. As long as this tactic worked, they would never stop.

  Weirdly, we spent a lot of that day trying to keep the survey site from crashing. The survey included an opportunity for participants to give us their email address (and allow us to email them if we wanted to). And we asked them some basic questions about what they were worried about or struggling with. And we also asked a very general question—“How do you feel about Altus?”—and that question became . . . important.

  In addition to internet stuff, we also had text messages flooding in. April had already agreed to bring Robin back on to manage her life. Every kind of press outlet wanted April on. An interview, a quote, a single individual strand of hair. Most of those requests had been either declined outright or she had offered up Andy to discuss the Altus Space instead.

  Robin had pointed out, correctly, that usually people want to give quotes and be on TV to get their message out. Right now, April wasn’t having any trouble getting her message out all on her own. So instead, the plan was to sit tight, respond carefully to positive things on the internet, and Ignore. Everything. Else. In our free time we would enjoy Mr. Crane’s ludicrous apartment, watch Netflix, read Agatha Christie novels, craft careful and cutting communications that weakened Altus, and dive deep into our survey responses.

  Except there were just too many. Even with the survey page being down for most of the first day, we had literally millions of responses to go through. No matter how we filtered, there just wasn’t a good way.

  April and I were griping about this around the black marble countertop in the kitchen when Carl came in and overheard us.

  “Just do a search,” Carl said.

  “The searches take forever and we don’t know what to search for,” April replied. “It’s just a bunch of dumb data. Most of the useful stuff is in text responses, which is impossible to parse.”

  Monkey Carl made a little hissing noise with their actually monkey throat, which was what went for laughter for them.

  “No, with your mind. You have this power, but you barely ever use it.”

  “It hurts her,” I said defensively.

  “It’s not that,” April replied carefully. “It’s just . . . it reminds me of . . . that I’m different now.”

  “April, you are different now whether you use it or not,” Carl said.

  �
��But what would I search for?”

  “You are tapping into my processing power. You can ask for anything you like—my systems will process it for you.”

  “What?” April said incredulously. “I thought I just got raw data.”

  “No! Lord, no, a system collates and returns what you ask for.”

  “So I could ask nonspecific questions?”

  “Of course. How dumb do you think I am?”

  It got strangely normal to talk to a monkey, but it never got normal talking to Carl.

  “I don’t know how any of this works!”

  I agreed with her frustration. We’d been living with Carl for weeks and they hadn’t mentioned this?

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I want to know what people don’t like about Altus.”

  “OK, yes, that is an example of a question that would not narrow things down effectively.” Carl stroked their monkey chin. “What about ‘I need a summary of the main concerns people have with Altus’?”

  “And that will work?” I asked, perplexed.

  “I can predict the future,” Carl said, like I was being silly.

  I looked over to April, and she had her eyes closed. Suddenly her jaw tensed and her head tilted forward.

  “Holy shit,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Well, I know why people don’t like Altus. I mean, at least the people who responded to the survey. Holy shit. Like, exactly.”

  “And?”

  “Sixty-six percent cited economic concerns, 37 percent cited social concerns, like that a loved one was addicted, 32 percent cited concerns about inequality of access, and 12 percent cited concerns that Altus use would exacerbate the ‘cultural divide.’”

  I opened a Google Doc to start writing things down, but it wouldn’t open. “I think the internet is down.”