A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

by Hank Green

  DAY EIGHTEEN OF NINETEEN

  Carl said it would be nineteen days, and it had been eighteen. It seemed impossible that we would be in Val Verde tomorrow. It felt like we had done good work. Our social media minions, along with Altus’s own actions, had destroyed most of their favorability. Unsurprisingly, an army of Peter Petrawicki fanboys had appeared to defend their billionaire idol, but they just weren’t getting much traction.

  Maya seemed to be almost entirely recovered physically, and I was doing a heck of a lot better mentally. The white stuff remained in her chest, but as long as it kept her healthy, I was overjoyed to see it there.

  It was a fine life, but I was starting to wonder when the other shoe was going to drop, when were we going to get to see Miranda again. I was terrified of going to Val Verde and meeting with Peter face‐to‐face. I had no idea what we were going to do when we got there. At the same time, I was absolutely done being confined in this luxurious apartment. There was only so far gorgeous views, a Peloton, and newly rekindled love could take you. We both needed out.

  We’d just finished dinner and were all sitting in Mr. Crane’s ridiculous living room when I attempted to distract myself by asking a question that had been on my mind for a while. I thought it was going to de-stress things. HA!

  “Hey, Carl,” I said, “why can Andy come here and we don’t have to worry about your brother finding us?”

  “I can confound my brother in specific areas. He can’t effectively surveil Andy or predict his actions. Basically, I have a clear predictive model of your group of friends, and I have done things that make his predictive model nonsensical. This is going to become a bad conversation soon, so just know that I knew that going in.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Maya has just figured something out, and it’s going to make you both very angry,” they told me. I turned to Maya, and her eyes were wide, her mouth holding just a hint of tension, but I knew that look.

  “So you . . .” she said, and then, “Wow. You’re right.” She had clearly and suddenly gotten very mad.

  “Can one of you two just explain what is going on right now?” I said, getting scared.

  “Carl,” she said carefully, “if you are so good at predicting things surrounding me and April, you must have known that someone was coming to that cabin in Vermont.”

  “I did.”

  “And if you can confound your brother’s predictions, why didn’t you do it then?”

  “Because I didn’t want to.”

  My heart dropped through the floor. What? I thought maybe I had heard that wrong. I turned to them, “Explain yourself right now.”

  The monkey looked back at me, their little face stony. “You needed to know the extent of the danger. I did not know what my brother would do, but I knew he would send someone after you. I had to wait until the threat was clear. It was a dangerous risk, but there was no better way.”

  “You could have just hidden us, though.” I stood up from the couch and turned to look at them. Carl followed suit, standing up on the couch to take the full force of my emotions.

  “I could have protected you, but it would have doomed your system.”

  “Fuck. The. System,” I said. “You said it was a risk. You can predict the future—how likely was it that Maya didn’t leave that cabin alive?”

  “In roughly 4 percent of simulations, Maya died,” Carl said.

  I leaned over Carl, feeling light-headed as embers flicked the inside of my mind. Slowly, I said, “What gives you that right?”

  Carl responded immediately, their amber eyes hard but sad. “Only that I have the ability.”

  “What?” I had been expecting Carl to defend themself.

  “Power is just a lack of constraint.”

  I didn’t understand what they were saying. Maybe I was too angry, or maybe it was too abstract. But then I heard Maya’s voice. I had almost forgotten she was there.

  “Carl’s right, that’s what power is. It’s just ability and desire without restriction. What restriction does Carl have, aside from their random rules and the laws of physics. They have the power because they have the power. That’s how power has always been.”

  “Leave,” I said.

  “I can’t,” Carl replied immediately. “I know I have lost your friendship, and I’ve known it would happen for a long time. It hurts, but pain is just part of what it is to be me now. Regardless, I have to go with you to Altus. If I don’t, you will both die.”

  Suddenly and irrationally, a rage rose in me fast and bright, maybe a flashback to my emotional hangover, and I thought I might hit them. But what would that achieve? Carl wasn’t the monkey; the monkey was just a body they were in.

  “April”—Carl’s voice was maddeningly calm—“I hate the choices I have to make, but I have to make them because I’m the only one who can.”

  I looked over to Maya for permission to flip out, but somehow her face showed a kind of acceptance.

  “Maya, they almost killed you!” I said, gesturing to the situation, hoping she would give me permission to let my guard down and have a true and terrible tantrum.

  “April . . .” And then she started crying.

  I looked down at my hands, one opaque milky glass, and realized what I had been missing. Carl had almost killed me too. What were the odds that I came out of that warehouse alive? Did I? Did this life even count?

  It was too much. “I have to go . . . Maya, we have to go.”

  “We all have to go,” Carl said. “We’re going to Altus, now. Go pack.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean, I mean I need to get away from you,” I said, staring into their eyes.

  “If you go alone, you’ll both die.”

  Carl lowered themself from the couch and walked to their room. The door closed softly behind them.

  My phone buzzed on the couch. It was Andy.

  ANDY

  Jason had come into my room and started kicking me. I had been up all night watching the markets plunge and watching my AltaCoin explode.

  “What the fuck, dude,” I said once my headset was off, blinking in the light of the day. I had no idea what time it was.

  “Fuck you, get up and come with me,” he replied. I hadn’t recorded an episode of Slainspotting in weeks. I hadn’t even consumed a piece of media that wasn’t either inside of Altus or about Altus for weeks. I knew I was letting him down. I knew I wasn’t being healthy, and that he wasn’t sure whether to be more furious or worried, but I was convinced that I needed to know everything about Altus to be the leader I needed to be in the coming revolution, whenever that was going to be. Little did I know it would be tomorrow.

  But I knew fighting Jason was no use. His jaw was fixed and his eyes were hard. Also, I needed to go for a walk—my body was aching.

  So I got up and followed Jason out of the apartment, down the elevator, and onto our street, which was deserted, and to a coffee shop. We each got an Americano and sat down.

  “Look around at the people in here, tell me what you see.”

  “There aren’t very many people in here,” I responded.

  “It’s 10 A.M. Does that seem strange to you?”

  I never knew what time it was anymore, so Jason was right that he had to tell me. The place was usually packed at this time of day. I spent more time looking at each of the people in the coffee shop. “We’re the only guys in here except for the guy in the back, who looks like he’s been hit by a train.”

  Jason was silent, but his eyebrows went up in a gesture I interpreted as “And?”

  “Oh, is that what I look like?”

  “Yeah, that guy is an obvious Altus hound, and so are you. You’ve all got the same look and it isn’t a good one.”

  I rubbed my chin, which was past prickly and into hairy. I’d been trying to keep presentable for the TV cameras, but I
hadn’t had any interviews in the last few days, and traditional news was feeling more and more irrelevant to me anyway.

  “Why is it just women in here?”

  “Oh, I dunno . . . Have you ever noticed how the Altus Space is largely about ‘intellectual debate’ and ‘self-improvement’ and porn? Jesus, dude, you’re supposed to be an expert on this stuff. Have you never noticed who your audience is?”

  Of course I had—I’d even seen think pieces talking about how Altus was built by men for men and how it was a weakness of the company—but talking about that wasn’t good for what I was trying to do, so I hadn’t put a lot of thought toward it. I groggily sipped my coffee, feeling the pit opening inside me.

  Jason didn’t know the plan. I was only setting myself up to be a leader in the Space so I would be credible when I turned my back on it. And I’d do that as soon as it was the right time. Except that “the right time” seemed further away every day. And every day I felt a little more like the Space was the next step forward in human consciousness. Yeah, sure, I looked sallow and unkempt. And yes, Altus was being run the wrong way, but still, it was so powerful. And I was a part of that, a part of something so big it was crashing the world economy and making me disgustingly rich.

  Even while I sat there with Jason, my mind wanted to go grab my headset. I didn’t even know what I would do once I was there. I just wanted it.

  The Space actually could make humanity better—of that I had no doubt. The way it was being run . . . Jason was right. It was mostly a bunch of dudes making stuff that mostly appealed to a bunch of dudes. And Altus had set it up so that they would be making money from every angle possible.

  Everyone who had access was taking their first crack at a sandbox or an experience and spending all of the rest of their time mining AltaCoin so they could buy more.

  Altus was now worth hundreds of billions of dollars. But that day there was a 20 percent stock market drop, trillions of dollars of value lost—if no one wanted or needed to buy things, if all of the best human experiences were inside the Altus Space . . . what was the economy even for?

  “Can’t you see that Altus is just . . . bad?”

  I found myself wishing I could experience Jason’s brain to know where that sentence had come from.

  “It’s not good or bad,” I said. “It’s just another tool. We just have to do the right things with it.”

  “And who’s going to decide who does the right things? Peter Petrawicki?”

  I looked at him for a long few seconds and then said, “Yeah, fuck you, man.” And I stood up and walked out of the coffee shop and back up to my room.

  There was a padded envelope on my bed. I stared at it for a long time and then finally opened it. The Book of Good Times. I threw it straight into the wall, screaming. But then it just sat there on my floor, open, showing words that I knew I was going to read eventually. So I went over to it and read.

  A part of you is wondering if I made you colossally wealthy just so you would know that being colossally wealthy will not make you happy. But no, that is only a side effect. It’s only made you more miserable, of course, which is also not what I want. I want you to be happy, and there’s a good chance that you will be, though it will cost you.

  I’m trying to change something in this world, and it’s going to take a lot of money.

  I had had hundreds of millions of dollars when Carl told me to convert everything to AltaCoin. In the time since then, the value of AltaCoin had increased 1,000 percent. So, while my wealth was just numbers on a screen, if I cashed it out today, I would have $5 billion. I was a real live billionaire now.

  I know it’s been a bad day, but I guess the thing I most need to tell you is that you’re on the right path, and you’ve nearly walked the entire thing. You may be wondering when the time is to act, but when you realize it, you will not be unsure. You will know exactly when you need to act, so if you aren’t sure, it isn’t time.

  It will be time soon.

  Also, don’t be a jerk to your friends. You need them.

  Fuck you, Carl, I thought to myself. What the hell right did they have to tell me how to treat my friends.

  My sleep schedule was so messed up by the Space. I always felt rested and I always felt groggy. No one thought it was healthy to spend twenty hours a day inside Altus, but no one had definitely died of it. Sure, people had died, but people died in the real world too. There just hadn’t been time to do any research on the actual effects before Altus launched. The point was, I hadn’t actually slept in weeks, and I wanted to know if I could still do it.

  I lay down on my bed, prepared for hours of insomnia-fueled brain ramblings, but actually, I was unconscious in minutes. And then I slept from like ten thirty in the morning till nine at night, because that’s healthy, right?! My default upon waking was to just reach for the headset, but that felt wrong. Jason’s words had stuck in me like splinters. He didn’t know what I was doing. April and Maya and Miranda and The Thread and I were all doing something together—something big! And I couldn’t tell him, so of course he was mad . . . but still, shouldn’t he trust me?

  I thought about The Thread, and the video we were working on about inequality and Altus. I thought about Maya and April up in their tower, barely tweeting anything at all.

  And then I thought about Miranda, all alone, working at Altus headquarters. God, Miranda, we hadn’t heard from her in over a month now. She hadn’t even sent a Don’t worry about me, I’m fine message. And then I started to feel ill because I honestly hadn’t really been thinking about her much. She was down there in Val Verde taking risks for us all, and I’d just spaced on her. Panic boiled up in me. Was she OK? How could I help her? We’d gone way too long without hearing anything from her at all.

  Where would she hide something? I thought to myself. If Miranda wanted to talk with me, where would she go?

  I grabbed my headset and entered Altus Space, opened the search dialogue, and inputted the most Miranda thing I could think of: “Lab.” There were a few results where you could play with a dog, which sounded lovely, but five results down a result said “Chemistry Lab.” It was part of a broader sandbox that was pretty unpopular, a really well-constructed school.

  Not knowing what I would be looking for, I entered “Chemistry Lab” and started to move through the room. It was . . . a chemistry lab. It had all of the normal chemistry lab stuff.

  There were lab benches and beakers. Each bench had a sink in it, and there was a periodic table on one wall and, at the front of the room, a blackboard with a few chemical equations written on it. It was all very carefully done.

  Would this be the place Miranda would use to try and communicate with me? Was there anything stopping her? Did everything get inspected on the way out? She said that they were extremely careful. But it was worth a try, right? I opened every drawer, looked under every lab bench, and found nothing but crisp, unmarked surfaces. The room wasn’t just new; it was Altus new. That feeling of everything being just a little too perfect, a little too crisp, not a speck of dust anywhere. There was another thing that was a little off, but was common in the Space: There were no books.

  Writing had to be inputted manually when constructing sandboxes, so when there was writing, it was usually just a few lines. Except that periodic table was a doozy. Every box was filled in not just with the element’s symbol but also its name and its atomic weight. Someone had spent a lot of time on that table, maybe as much time as they spent on the entire rest of the room.

  I walked over to that poster with my heart in my teeth. I held my hand out, tracing the boxes, looking for the one I wanted.

  It took too long, but there, at the way, way bottom: Americium. I got close, inspecting the little square. I traced it with my finger. It looked normal, like nothing at all special. I pushed on it, and it pushed back into the wall. I let go, and it popped out.

 
; Inside, there was a small piece of paper.

  Hello,

  Don’t freak out too much. I’ve been imprisoned in Val Verde. I’m in the high-security area, which is outside of the main campus. It’s a big cinder block building with no windows and an armed guard. I’ve been trapped inside of the Altus Space for, I think, weeks now? I am not going to sugarcoat it: It is very bad to be trapped inside your own mind. Making this for you has been the only thing keeping me sane. The thing that’s scaring me the most, honestly, is that I have no idea how I’m eating food or going to the bathroom. What are they doing with my body? This isn’t OK. And I don’t think I’m the only one. I think a lot of people from Val Verde have agreed to be in this prison, but that doesn’t make it less of a prison. Maybe if the rest of the world knows about this it would hurt them.

  Please come as soon as you get this. I’m afraid of what they’ll do if they find out I’ve tried this. If they’ll do this . . . what else will they do? Just hurry, OK?

  I’m sorry I’m such a mess,

  Miranda

  How long ago had she left that message? Every day that I’d been defending Altus, enjoying the Space, feeling powerful and loving my addiction, had been a day when Miranda had been trapped. I didn’t want to confront the real reason I was so disgusted with myself: I had started to think maybe Peter was OK. I mean, he was bad, obviously, but not evil. But this was evil. I had sent Miranda to Altus, and then I had just forgotten about her. Is that the kind of friend I was? The kind of person I was?

  I exited the Space, tore off my headset, and found Jason and Bex sitting in my room. Jason was leaning on my desk; Bex was in the desk chair.

  “Andy,” Jason said, standing up.

  “Hey, guys?” I said, anxious.

  “We need to talk about some stuff,” Bex said to me. I had thought maybe I wasn’t ever going to see her again.