A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

by Hank Green

  “I’m really sorry, I’m sure this is important, but it has to wait.” I moved to grab my phone from my nightstand, but Jason beat me to it.

  “Why don’t you tell us what’s going on?” Jason said.

  “Give me. My fucking. Phone.”

  He didn’t give me my phone.

  “Andy, we need to talk about how you’re handling the world. You haven’t been outside in days. Ever since April came back, you’ve been unhealthy, and we’re worried about you.”

  “Look, guys, your hearts are absolutely in the right place, but you don’t know what’s going on here. This is the only moment when I can’t handle this. Give me my phone and leave. Right now.”

  Bex stood up from the desk chair, “You’re totally right, Andy. We don’t know what’s going on. Why don’t you help us? Why don’t you help us understand?”

  “Can’t you just trust me?” I said.

  Jason and Bex looked at each other. “No,” Jason said finally. “No, I think we could have a while back, but you can’t see you from our eyes. People are dying in the Space, Andy. And we’ve been tracking you—you’re in there so much more than is healthy.”

  “Tell us,” Bex said. “Just tell us what’s going on.”

  I thought about it and realized it would be faster, and it would all be public soon anyway, so who cared.

  “April, Maya, Robin, Miranda, and I have been plotting to take down Altus. We don’t know exactly how, but we’ve been waiting for the right moment. I think the right moment is now. I just got a message from Miranda that she’s been kidnapped by Altus and we need to get her out.”

  As I told them this, I could see them glancing back and forth at each other. Did they believe me?

  “You’re . . . you’re planning on taking Altus . . . down? What does that mean?” Jason asked.

  “Like, we want to take control of the technology, or just eliminate it altogether.”

  “But,” Bex said, “you love it.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s not evil. Look, I don’t actually want to destroy it, but that would be better than leaving it in the hands of these people.”

  “So,” said Bex, “how the hell are you going to do that?”

  “Well,” I said . . . and then I realized that, of course, I had no idea. “Well, we’re going to go to Val Verde. We’re going to document what’s going on there and then show the world.”

  “Do you think that’s going to stop Altus?” Bex asked.

  I thought about it. I thought about how addictive, how important and powerful, the Space was. And then I thought about how no one seemed to have any control over them except people who would lose billions of dollars if Altus stopped growing.

  “The Space is a superpower, and one that people worked their asses off to get to.” Even now, as I was telling myself that I wouldn’t ever use Altus again, another part of me was saying, OK, but keep your options open.

  “But maybe if we hit Altus hard enough, the company will break. Maybe the value of the company will drop and the investors will get spooked or something?” I said, winging it.

  Bex exhaled an annoyed laugh. “No, Altus seems to make even good people make terrible decisions.” I had to look away as she said it. “And besides, they’re too valuable. We could show the world how awful they are, but the board would just kick out the C-level management or, in the best case for us, they’d sell to someone else who would reopen a new Space in a matter of months. The investors have put in billions, we won’t be able to get them to give it up by hurting Altus.”

  Jason and I looked at each other.

  “Don’t look so shocked—do you guys think I’m majoring in sandwiches?”

  “What are you majoring in?” Jason asked.

  “Also, how have I never asked you that?” I added.

  “Finance, and you’ll have to examine that question for yourself,” she said to me.

  “Private equity,” I said.

  “Yes, well, venture capital, more specifically,” Bex said. “Though I’m sure some private equity firms are involved.”

  “No, private equity . . . Bex, I have an idea, I need you to tell me how idiotic it is. We call this guy—” I went to my desk and dug through a drawer until I found the card from the private equity manager I had talked to in Cannes. “We tell him we know that Altus is about to fail catastrophically and we want to buy the company when investors start feeling the pressure to abandon it. That guy figures out how exactly all that works while April and Maya send The Thread a bunch of footage of how Altus has kidnapped and imprisoned people inside the Altus Space. The Thread publishes that video and then shares the names of each one of those investors along with email addresses so that people can tell them to sell their shares of Altus stock. Then, we buy Altus.” I was pretty fucking proud of this plan, honestly.

  “That . . . is an idiotic idea,” she said. “There’s no way you have enough money to buy Altus.”

  “I have five billion dollars,” I said.

  “Oh,” she replied. And then, “No, you don’t.”

  Jason was just staring at me with his mouth open.

  “Probably more than that now.”

  “You do not have five billion dollars,” Bex said.

  “I know it’s strange, but I invested . . . wisely, I guess.”

  “The book,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The book!”

  “The book?”

  “What are you two talking about?” Jason pitched in.

  Bex jammed her hand into her purse and pulled out a book. “This book can predict the future. It told me you were going to ask me to go to fucking STOMP. It told me to play piano more and gave me some stock tips and said that you were going to be a dick to me but that I had to come here today anyway.”

  “Wait, how long have you been getting these?”

  “Oh, since a couple weeks before we met,” she said sheepishly.

  “WHAT?! But that first day, I asked if the book looked familiar.”

  “I lieeeed?” she said, drawing out the word. “The book was really specific . . . and helpful, and I was scared to mess it up!”

  “So you’ve been making money too?” I asked, realizing that there was a chance that there were more people like Bex out there with a LOT of new money.

  “Yes, but not five billion dollars. And it’s not just that. The fact that it was good at picking stocks made me trust it, and every time I took the book’s advice, I was happier, so I started taking it more. I felt better. I saw my family more. I was a better friend. The book helped me ask for help when I needed it. It helped me help you when you needed it. I listened to more music, I played piano more.”

  This was (very) roughly true of me as well. The book hadn’t made me happier, but that was an uphill battle considering the circumstances.

  “So, you have five billion dollars,” she said. I don’t know why I’d assumed that the books were only for our little crew—seeing one in Bex’s hands made my head spin. I wondered if I should tell her that it was Carl who had been sending them, but I didn’t get a chance.

  “It probably still isn’t enough,” she said.

  “What?!” Jason and I said together.

  “Five billion dollars is like 1 percent of their most recent valuation. We need to hurt them bad enough that investors will take a 99 percent bath.”

  “And proving that they’ve invested in a company that is literally kidnapping and imprisoning people won’t do that?”

  She thought about this for maybe one second before saying, “No. I mean, probably not. I don’t see what else we can do. But I think they’ll find a way to squeeze more than a measly five billion out of it, even if we do make them look like trash for having invested in the first place. But”—and here she did pause to think—“investors are irrational. They’re just
people. We have to scare them. We have to make them think it’s going to zero.”

  “I think maybe The Thread can do that.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, but I had confidence they could. They clearly were looking for a good story about Altus. It was becoming the only story, and everyone wanted to talk about it. It had to be about more than how bad they were; it had to be about how they weren’t going to be able to make money anymore.

  And then Jason had a good idea. “You should call April.”

  “I was about to before you stole my phone, you dick!”

  FORMER AIRBNB EXECUTIVE LAUNCHES ALTUS-SPECIFIC HOUSING ACROSS SILICON VALLEY

  TechCrunch

  Among the droves of Altus-related start-ups popping up every single day, occasionally we find one that completely blows our minds.

  Jeremy O, former CTO of Airbnb, today announced a new start-up called Gateway that is buying and remodeling homes to be used specifically by people who are spending the majority of their time inside of the Altus Space. Individual homes are being subdivided to house up to twenty-five people.

  The living and sleeping space is tiny, but rents are too. Meals are prepared by a live-in maid, and bathroom and workout breaks are prescheduled so that roommates don’t overlap.

  “This isn’t meant to be a long-term living situation,” Mr. O told TechCrunch. “It’s for people who are looking to save a little cash while they build up their AltaCoin.”

  Dystopian shit? Maybe. But also, who needs a house anymore anyway?

  APRIL

  I placed the phone on the couch between me and Maya and answered Andy’s call. “What is it?”

  “Miranda is in trouble.” He sounded jittery—excited or scared. “She left a message inside the Altus Space.” He told us the gist of the message.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. Thinking about Miranda with all of her life and energy locked away and unable to move her own body was crushing. “Carl just told us we need to go to Altus now, but I have no idea what to do when we get there.”

  I looked up at Maya, who was looking at me like we were living inside a nightmare, but I was ready to take any chance to get out of this damned apartment.

  “We have a plan,” Andy said.

  “Who is we?” Maya asked.

  “Me, Jason, and Bex. You don’t know Bex.”

  “And we trust all of these people?” Maya continued the cross-examination.

  “If you can trust me, you can trust them. It’s a long story, but we think this will work.”

  Andy explained about his money and the plan to scare Altus’s investors so much that they would sell enough of the company that we could control it.

  “But we don’t know if it’s enough money,” Bex added. “We either need more, or we need something that convinces everyone that Altus is actually worthless.”

  “More money, then,” Andy said, knowing the power of Altus too well.

  “I don’t have anything like a billion dollars,” I said. “Do we know anyone who does?”

  No one said anything, so Andy continued.

  “You need to go to Val Verde and rescue Miranda, we’re staying here. We have a lot of phone calls to make. As soon as you can get access to the internet there, you need to send us every scrap of dirt you can find on Altus.”

  “I love this, Andy,” Maya said, “except we have no idea how to infiltrate a secret Caribbean supervillain’s lair.”

  Carl appeared, slinking out of the hallway and pulling a child’s backpack onto their back, and said, “I do.”

  After we hung up with Andy, and as Maya and I were trying to figure out how exactly one dressed for this kind of thing, Carl again popped his head in.

  “Maya,” Carl said, “I need to talk to you alone.”

  That was weird, but the balance of power had shifted to Carl. They were the only thing keeping us safe. I waited in the living room while they talked, and when they emerged, I could tell Maya had been crying.

  “Is everything OK?” I said, a little panicked.

  “Yeah, they were good tears. But I can’t tell you. I’m sorry.” And then she grabbed my gaze with an unforgettable look and said, “We have to make this happen, April. We have to.”

  * * *

  —

  Our pilots were waiting for us when we got to Teterboro.

  “Ms. May,” one of them said, “we’ll be flying you straight to Val Verde. We’ve been briefed.”

  “By who?” Maya asked incredulously.

  The pilot winked at us and then said, “Technically, we cannot land at the private airstrip in Val Verde without notifying them of our flight plan. We are going to do that anyway.”

  “Wait, this is weird. You need to tell us what’s going on,” Maya pushed.

  “Let’s just say that we’re both very grateful to a little book.” He gestured to the copilot. “Both of us have had a string of luck. And it hasn’t led us wrong yet.”

  We didn’t need to wait in any security lines, and we didn’t need to put a monkey through an X-ray machine. The pilots didn’t even seem to care that there was a monkey (maybe the book had told them that Carl was potty trained).

  When we were alone in the cabin and getting ready to take off, I asked Maya, “How many people do you think have been getting these books?!”

  “Only a few dozen,” Carl said, overhearing me. “It takes resources to know exactly where to place them and how they will affect people. Little nudges here and there can have large effects.”

  I didn’t want to talk to Carl, so I ignored them.

  Maya turned to me. “Is this definitely the best way to do this?”

  “I have no idea. I kinda expected us to be sneaking in through the jungle or something. Landing a plane in the middle of their secret base doesn’t seem very stealthy, even if it is in the middle of the night.”

  “We’ll figure it out,” Carl said.

  “Is that honestly the best you can do, you shitty sentient monkey?” I said, not as a joke. I was trying to be mean.

  “This is what has to happen. You are the only thing my brother cannot predict, and the Altus campus is the only thing I cannot predict. Only in bringing those two things together does the future become completely unpredictable.”

  The plane began to surge forward, and it got loud in the cabin, making it hard to keep the discussion going.

  * * *

  —

  I didn’t want to talk to Carl, and their hearing was too good for them to not be inside of every conversation. So mostly, Maya and I traveled in silence, each of us looking out our windows, wondering how in the world our lives had ended up this way.

  I think that happiness is very important. But I will also say that the most effective people I know are not the happiest, and there is something to be said for effectiveness. Even if we were managing a team of nearly a hundred thousand volunteer social media users, living with my girlfriend and my monkey, watching Netflix, having breakfast, and taking care of a single lovingly spoiled potato plant was pretty fucking relaxing. But I think there’s something inside of us, something at the seed level, something that blooms in us in adolescence and never leaves . . . and it’s just . . . want. Some people have more of it than others, but I think we all have it. And the most amazing tool that I think anyone in the world can have is the ability to control and direct that want.

  Some people work to minimize it with mindfulness and meditation; some people let it grow and run free and take over their lives. But some people, and I consider myself one of them, study their want, refine it, and build an engine that burns it. Even if their want pushes all in one direction, they can tack against it like a sailboat, getting somewhere better than where they wanted to be.

  I know my want. I know that big well inside of me is never going to get filled. I know tha
t life is not about actually satisfying the want; it’s about using it. In that moment, all of my wants were pushing me to Val Verde. I wanted to make Maya proud of me. I wanted to be important. I wanted all of this to be worth something. I wanted to save the world, and I wanted to have saved the world. I wanted to find some end to all of this, and I wanted life to be normal again.

  Maybe if we could take down Altus, we could have all of that. People would remain free to continue the beautifully stupid endeavor of humanity, and I would just be a person again. Well, maybe not just a person, but close enough anyway.

  The point is, if you want to be happy, let go of your wants. If you want to be effective, harness them. I think either strategy is OK, but I’ve made my choice. Sorry, Mom.

  * * *

  —

  “I think I figured it out,” I said to Maya, knowing Carl would hear me.

  “What?” Maya asked.

  “Where the money is going to come from.”

  “The billions of dollars?” Maya asked.

  “Yeah, yeah . . .” And then I told her.

  She looked back at me with a slight curl of disgust in her lip. “I mean, if that works, then I guess it was all worth it.”

  ANDY

  It was time. I went on the Altus exchange and started selling AltaCoin for cash. I couldn’t do it all at once because there simply weren’t enough people buying. Every time I sold a hunk, the price would drop. But eventually, a few million dollars at a time, it all flowed out of my account and, instead of cryptocurrency, my bank account had billions of actual dollars in it.

  I apologize for interrupting a fairly intense moment with a bunch of stuff about . . . fucking finance, but it’s important.

  Remember Stewart Patrick, the guy who ran the private equity conference in Cannes and who gave me his business card? Well, I’d looked him up and, guess what, he was born before Star Trek: The Next Generation came out, so he probably wasn’t named after Patrick Stewart. It was the kind of lie that really didn’t matter except it let you know that a guy didn’t mind lying for no reason.