A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

by Hank Green

An idea is not good just because it can make money. And I’m not alone in that belief.

  Over 80 percent of people worldwide have an unfavorable view of Altus, and that includes many people who regularly use the service. It seems, though, that there is no getting rid of them.

  But that’s not true. It will be true soon, but it’s not true yet.

  We have set up an account, details in the description, and we are asking everyone to send in ten dollars.

  Now, when I say “everyone,” here’s the thing: I mean everyone.

  It is time to decide whether the world would be better without Altus.

  From the moment this video gets uploaded, we have three hours to raise twenty billion dollars to buy Altus and shut it down. We have it on good authority that Altus’s investors will soon be looking for a way out, and we have already raised billions of dollars from anonymous rich people. But we can’t just do this with rich people because this can’t be something just some person decided to do. We have to do it together.

  So we have three hours and we need two billion people to give us ten dollars. Give more if you can, but you can’t give less. Call people, wake them up, tell them this is our last chance and our only chance. It doesn’t have to be like this. If we raise it, we will buy the company, and Altus will no longer exist. We can free ourselves forever from this, we can take our economy back, we can take our lives back.

 

  Ten dollars. That’s what we need, to go back to the old world where we lived, for your money to be worth something again, for power to be ours and not these people’s. I know that, for many of you, every dollar matters. Well, it never mattered more than it does today. You know how to spread the word. Do it. Three hours, that’s as long as I can hold this door. Starting now.

  ANDY

  I got April’s footage and edited it together faster than I have ever done anything in my life, every moment of it believing that we wouldn’t actually be shutting Altus down. We could fix it. If two billion people spent money to buy Altus, then what would an Altus with two billion shareholders really look like? What could we make if we took this power and used it to try something completely new and open that no one controlled and everyone shared? That is the thought—the lie—that kept me working without thinking too much about what I was doing.

  Because, as much as I knew Altus was a fucking unprecedentedly evil disaster, I also didn’t want to, like, stop using it. And not just because I was addicted, but because it was amazing! I’d learned Spanish in a month! Everyone who invested in Altus did it because they saw the potential to remake the human experience. What if that value was used to increase equality instead of just to make a profit? What could we become? That was too valuable a tool to just destroy.

  If this went according to plan, I would control the bank account that bought Altus. And that thought was there, lurking in the back of my mind. Ultimately, I would be the one who legally owned Altus at the end of this day. Me, and me alone.

  I also recognized the genius of April’s tactic. Mobilize people immediately and don’t give the opposition any time at all to mount any kind of resistance. But $20 billion was a big ask. An unprecedented ask, really. But if anyone could pull it off, it was April, the literal resurrected chosen one, the biggest social media influencer of our age.

  The moment the video was up, I called Stewart Patrick and told him to watch it.

  He did. “This all seems very precarious,” he said to me. “These investors are not going to sell because Altus is bad for the world or even deeply immoral. They’ll replace Peter, they might even open themselves up to regulation, but they won’t sell.”

  “They have a plan,” I said.

  “What is the plan?” The ask was firm—it gave no space for the possibility of the question not being answered.

  “I . . . don’t know,” I said.

  “You don’t know.” He was quiet for a second, and then, “Fuck. FUCK. I should have known better than to hang this on you kids.” His demeanor had changed suddenly and completely. “There’s a lot on the line here. A lot of fucking money, my reputation. Maybe my career. I’ve been selling every high-net-worth asshole and sovereign wealth manager on the planet on a giant blowup, and so far all you have is that some dickshit kidnapped a girl? Do better.” His voice was cold. “Do better right fucking now.” And then he hung up.

  I opened up the account that we had set up. Already, there were five hundred thousand new dollars. But then I did the math: $500,000 is, get this, 0.025 percent of $20 billion.

  Andy Skampt

  @AndySkampt

  I know this is going to be a shock to a lot of people, but I am officially done with Altus. This company has taken the greatest tool humanity has ever seen and turned it evil. I just sent in my $10, it’s your turn.

  33.1K replies 4.3M likes 562.9K retweets

  MAYA

  Finally, Miranda explained everything to me. We all watched the entire process of capturing an Altus experience using one of the rigs that were in the rooms that lined the long hallway. And then, after that work was done, we brought Sippy and his headset out into the hall where the massive robot Carl still sat gripping Peter Petrawicki’s hand.

  “We wanted you to see this,” I told him.

  “What are you doing?” He looked pale.

  “Peter, this is Sippy, he’s one of your user interface developers,” I told him. “He is about to input a terms of service experience. Every single person will get this message when they log in to Altus. And everyone currently in the Space will see it the moment they leave their current sandbox or experience. That’s how the terms of service updates work, right?”

  “And you think if you explain that what we’re doing here is immoral that you’ll somehow hurt us? Maybe a little. But nothing you can do will stop our work here.”

  I rolled my eyes at him. “This is Peanut.” Peter looked at him. “He’s also one of your employees, you might remember him because he can’t go into the Altus Space. He’s what people here call an incom . . . incapable of experiencing the Altus Space. But nothing about being unable to go into the Altus Space makes it impossible to capture an Altus experience.”

  Peter looked confused for a moment, but then his face went slack. He looked ill.

  “You can’t do that,” he said.

  “I can tell from your face that you know we can,” I said.

  “No, I mean, you can . . .” He was starting to beg. “But you can’t. Think about what you’ll be doing. You’ll be . . . you’ll be making a decision for all those people. Disabling them. It’s an attack. It’s terrorism!”

  Sippy looked over at me. I could see him questioning. He would lose the Space too, forever. Everyone would.

  “What gives you the right?” Peter asked.

  I leaned down into his face and said softly, “What gave you the right?” I could see that Sippy wasn’t as certain as he had been a few minutes before, so I continued. “Power is nothing but ability without restriction. You found a way to do this to the world. I found a way to undo it. That’s where we are.”

  “Your body is just thirty trillion cells working together,” Peter said, ignoring everyone but Sippy. “With Altus, humanity could finally be like that, seven billion people operating in radical, perfect empathy! This is the next step in human evolution, and you’re going to destroy it.”

  “No, you destroyed it.” Miranda bit off the words. And then she turned to Sippy. “He destroyed it when he decided to only use it for his own personal gain. He wants so badly to feel important that everything he does gets sucked into that hole. It was almost me. It was almost the whole world. Almost.”

  “Sippy, no,” Peter begged. “No, we can fix this. I’ll let you help me fix it.”

  Sippy looked at Miranda’s face. She looked hard and sad but also strong, with brown smears of dried blood stil
l marking her chin and neck.

  “They’re right, we messed up, but you can’t let them do this!” Peter yanked his hand against Carl’s hand. It held like steel. He strained toward us. “You can’t just destroy everything I’ve built.”

  “Everything you’ve built?” Miranda said, sounding shocked.

  I laughed a little. “He’ll never admit to how deeply he’s been used. That thing that fed him all of the information on how to build this, it wants to destroy us. It took over Miranda’s body and tried to use it to kill me.” I went over to Sippy and pulled my collar down to show him and Peanut the claw marks on my neck.

  My mind raced. I had thought about this a thousand times, but I’d never tried to say it out loud. And now I felt the world pressing on me. I lined up my thoughts, I put them in neat little rows, and I said them to Peter Petrawicki clearly and carefully so that Sippy would hear everything I said. I always felt a little like the whole world was weighing on every word I said, but this time, it might actually have been true.

  “You really do believe that power must always go to the people who deserve it, don’t you?” I said, more amazed than angry. “If you didn’t believe it, you’d have to spend some fraction of your time not feeling like Jesus, and that wouldn’t be any fun.

  “But then someone else gets some power, and you lose some of yours, and you don’t like that power has gone somewhere else. But you also can’t stop believing that power organizes itself correctly because your entire understanding of the world is based on that single idea. So, instead, you convince yourself that they’re cheating or corrupt or lying. Well, guess what? Today, power has organized itself in our hands instead of yours. That doesn’t mean something broke, it means you were never right. It is neither just nor unjust, it is just what happened. And you can rationalize it however you want, but it happened. You lost.”

  I wanted to look back at Sippy, but he didn’t know me and I didn’t know him. This was either enough, or it wasn’t.

  I stood still, silent, and then heard Miranda’s voice, soft and careful: “Sid, the thing that built Altus really did use my body to try to kill her. It might take me back over any time now. I don’t want it to. It was terrible. Please, it’s time.”

  I heard Sippy arranging the headset and finally turned to look.

  Peter began shouting behind me, pulling his hand against Carl’s iron grip. At first he was shouting words, but then it just became shrieks, like we were abducting his child while he watched. Maybe we were.

  Within moments, Sippy had implemented a fresh terms of service update tied to a new experience—Peanut’s experience of body dislocation.

  Sippy was then forced by the software to view the TOS update himself. He immediately threw off the headset, vomiting on the floor. I watched, too pleased, as a little drip of vomit flecked onto Peter’s khaki pants and he recoiled.

  And then, suddenly, Peter Petrawicki slumped over, no longer being held by Carl’s hand.

  At the same moment, monkey Carl revived. The little animal sprung up and padded over to me.

  “Carl!” I said, excited, thinking it must be good news. “Did we do it?”

  It didn’t say anything back.

  “Carl? Are you OK now? Did we . . .” And then I saw it. The depth in the monkey’s eyes had vanished. The shape of understanding had lost its form. I wasn’t looking at a monkey inhabited by an intelligence; I was looking at a monkey. I knew it immediately and without doubt.

  Miranda had moved over to check on Peter, who was lying completely motionless on the ground.

  “Carl?” I said again, and the monkey moved toward me and made a small chittering noise in its throat.

  Look, I have not hid that my feelings about Carl are complicated. They took April from me, they put her in danger, they showed over and over that they cared more about their plans than our lives. But also, Carl felt, at this point, like an inevitability, like someone who would always be there, guiding and knowing and caring. In that way, Carl felt like family. Maybe I didn’t trust them, maybe I wanted them to know they weren’t absolved of their past actions, but I didn’t realize until then that I had expected Carl to always be a part of my life.

  “CARL!” I shouted, and then the monkey ran from me. Of course it did. It ran down the hall toward where April was now standing. It crawled up her leg and then onto her shoulder.

  “April,” I said, knowing what was happening, but feeling like I was hanging over an edge. Her face was hard; she moved slowly, like she was lost.

  Dr. Noise

  @drnoise

  I just . . . fuck. I just was in the Space and something happened. It was awful, like I was seeing out of both elbows at once. Is that Body Dislocation? I puked on my mom’s carpet! @AltusLabs.

  63.1K replies 23.3K retweets 128.4K likes

  @drnoise

  Fuck, I just tried to get back in and it happened again. What’s wrong. I tried three times and each time it was like my whole body turned inside out and up was down and up and sideways at the same time.

  6K replies 1.3K retweets 9K likes

  @drnoise

  It’s not just me, is anyone able to get into the Space right now?

  1.9K replies 784 retweets 4.7K likes

  @drnoise

  People are saying that once this happens you can never go back. That better be a fucking lie. @AltusLabs.

  1.5K replies 1.4K retweets 3.7K likes

  APRIL

  It’s time to go back a bit. Remember when I fell unconscious in that hallway and Maya caught me and then I came back? I didn’t tell the full story then, and I haven’t since. I guess it’s time.

  I’m not going to pretend to understand what it’s like to be Carl, but they did their best to explain as I crashed out of my body and opened my eyes in the lobby we all used to wake up in back when we were sharing the Dream.

  “April . . .” Carl spoke in their comforting tenor. It was pleasant in the bright white room, warm and familiar. It felt like a gift. It felt, somehow, like home. Robot Carl was standing in front of me, towering and gleaming and sharp and kind. “April, I am dying.”

  “What? You . . .” I wanted to protest, to tell Carl that that was impossible, and if it wasn’t, then that we would save them somehow.

  Carl continued, in their clear voice. “I once spanned this planet. I was a nervous system that could sense any corner of the world, and even the corners of people’s consciousness. And I was nothing compared with the power we are up against. I am not going to exit this battle alive.”

  “No, there has to be a way, though,” I said. I had, not twelve hours before, been so angry with Carl that I didn’t want them to be in my life anymore, but now the possibility of losing them was carving into me and it was horrible. Carl was a constant.

  They continued, “There is not. When people mine AltaCoin, their entire mind is given over to my brother. The number of people doing that is increasing very fast. I could have hid, I could have lived here for centuries while he hunted down every secret enclave of my system, but I did not do that. Instead, I drew all of my power—everything I have, everything I am—to this island. All of me is here. My brother, he cannot do the same. He needs to maintain his whole network, and so we are on roughly equal footing here, but only here. I can hit him as hard as he can hit me, just not for as long. And I will be needed. He will draw me into direct contact because he knows I am a threat. Once he does it, I will be able to fight him, but not for long. I have cut off any avenue of escape myself. All of me is here and I will not be leaving.”

  “So, then . . . have we lost? Is it over?”

  “No,” Carl said immediately. “No, it is just . . . unlikely.” The sadness in their voice was immense.

  “How unlikely?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I cannot run simulations anymore.”

  “But if you can’t
run simulations, how will we even know if we’ve succeeded?”

  “Oh, my brother can still run them. If he calculates you have good odds of not destroying yourselves, he’ll just stop. I know some of his tools. He’s hurting the economy to make people easier to manipulate, and I know he’s behind The Thread now. If he stops, those things should stop too. That’s how you’ll know. Also, I’ll tell you when it’s safe to leave, or when it’s not, but I can’t help anymore. I’ll let you know that too. I have one or two tricks still up my sleeves. Right now, all of me is being devoted to giving you more time.”

  “More time to do what?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. You will have to figure it out.”

  “But I have no idea!” I shouted up at the statue. “I don’t know how to fix this!”

  I heard a noise, like water passing over rocks. I looked around the room to see where it was coming from, but then I realized Carl was laughing. “You still think I chose you.”

  “What?”

  “You think it was you,” Carl repeated.

  “But you did, you told me you did. You said you ran the simulations and I was the . . . the host who succeeded most often.”

  “You did not succeed in the simulations, the simulations showed successful outcomes.” The water trickled over the rocks again. “I chose you as host, but you were not the reason for the successes.”

  I waited for more, but Carl apparently wanted me to ask.

  “Who was it, then?”

  “I love you.” The words seemed so careful. “You are so . . . human. You still think it had to be someone. It wasn’t anyone, it was all of you.”

  * * *

  —

  And then I woke up back in that hallway in Val Verde, knowing that Carl was dying, knowing that every action they took on our part sped that process. Miranda wanted to run across the Altus campus, but I didn’t want her to because I knew Carl would have to consume their very self protecting her.