A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

by Hank Green

  I held the door so Carl wouldn’t have to. I fulfilled my part . . . I guarded the others. I made my video. I let the other heroes do their work. It was all of us. It was me and Maya and Andy and Miranda and Peanut and Sippy and Bex and even Stewart Patrick. And then the banging on the door stopped, and I thought maybe they had just moved on to some other tactic. Until a voice spoke in my head. Carl’s voice.

  “It’s time for you to go, April. Thank you. Goodbye.”

  As far as I know, those were Carl’s last words. Spoken in my head, a gift only for me. A gift I didn’t share until now because I wanted it to be mine only. But I guess you can have it too.

  I took a long, unsteady breath and noticed that same hollow feeling I’d had when we first arrived at Altus. I was no longer connected to anything outside myself. I knew if I let myself feel anything, it would be too much, so I put my emotions away. As I walked into the hallway, the monkey ran up to me and climbed onto my shoulder. I didn’t even need to look to know that this wasn’t Carl.

  “Where’s Carl?” Maya asked. I could hear the panic in her voice. But I didn’t answer. Instead, with the monkey on my shoulder, I walked down the hall. Peter Petrawicki was slumped and unmoving in his carpeted hallway next to the giant, empty statue that had once contained Carl.

  The sculpture’s back was still pressed against the door, and even though it was sitting down, I could still barely reach its head. But I did. I put my hand on its cheek, and I felt it. It was not the neither hot nor cold we had felt on 23rd Street. The face felt cool, like metal, like it was a sculpture someone had created and left as a piece of art in this long, opulent hallway.

  “We need to go,” I said. “The plane is waiting for us.”

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with Peter,” Miranda said.

  “He is just unconscious, he’ll wake up soon. They’ll all wake up soon. So we have to go now.”

  “How do you know that?” she asked. Leave it to Miranda to hold us up worrying about the worst possible guy.

  “I’ll tell you on the plane.” My voice sounded flat in my own ears.

  “Where’s Carl?” Maya repeated.

  I remembered back when Carl had tweaked my brain so that I couldn’t feel things. This wasn’t like that. The emotions weren’t being pushed down, they were in a writhing tangled mess in the back of my mind, but they couldn’t get to the surface. Not yet.

  “Carl died,” I said. I wasn’t letting myself feel it, and I saw Maya’s face shift as she did the same.

  “But if Carl died,” Miranda said, catching up with us, “then why am I still alive?”

  “Because we did it,” I said. “We did it.”

  I gathered my friends, and we walked out of the building together, over the unconscious bodies of Altus security guards. I led them, moving straight and fast, a signal that I wanted to be alone. I didn’t want any of them to see my face as it bunched together in grief, snot running into my mouth, tears pouring from my right eye.

  “We’ve got a few new passengers,” I told the pilots, the grief walled off for a moment.

  “Is everyone OK?” one of them asked.

  I didn’t know how to answer. I heard the sob bubble out of me before I knew it was happening. It was like vomit, unwelcome and uncontrolled. I felt Maya’s hand on my shoulder as she guided me back to the cabin.

  “Yes,” I heard her say. “Everyone is OK.”

  ANDY

  The donations grew exponentially. From 6 to 7 A.M. we received $400 million. But then from 7 to 7:10 we raised $300 million. People were willing to take the risk. They had lost friends and family, they had lost their savings, they felt the hope that ten dollars really could change things forever. And it was now or never.

  I told myself it would be enough, even as Stewart Patrick and Bex kept telling me it wouldn’t be.

  And then the news started coming in. I almost went into the Space to check, but I stopped myself. If you went in now, you would be forced to experience body dislocation, and once you had that experience, your mind locked onto it and could never go in again.

  Whatever April had done on that island, it had just destroyed the Space for millions of people who were currently logged in.

  I got a text from Stewart Patrick.

  Sorry I didn’t believe you. This is perfect. They’re going to start falling now.

  And fall they did. By the time our three-hour deadline was up, we had received donations from more than a billion people.

  Stewart started buying. And the moment one person sold at a new, lower valuation, other investors got even more freaked out and he could buy at an even lower price. Altus’s value crashed. He bought the entire Saudi sovereign fund’s 10 percent stake for $4 billion, setting the value of the company at just $40 billion.

  After that, the rest of the investors would sell at any price.

  I texted April, What did you do?

  I wanted it to sound like maybe I was just curious. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I thought. Maybe it was temporary. There had to be a way to turn it off, right?

  April: We’re on our way home. Altus is broken. From what we can tell, there’s no way to fix it. Spread the word. The investors will take any out we can give them.

  April: But don’t stop taking money. This was the world’s decision, they need to feel invested.

  That was April—there was no truth but the optics. I was having a hard time believing that we were actually going to raise $20 billion, but it looked like we were going to beat the goal substantially. Here’s a wild stat: If you distribute a billion dollars across everyone in the US, each person would only get $3. That doesn’t seem possible! But it works the other way too, every person only has to give $3 for someone to have a billion.

  At 9:30 A.M. eastern time, Stewart Patrick texted me to let me know that we were down to our last $200 million, and we now owned a controlling interest in Altus Labs.

  * * *

  —

  It turned out that we needed that $200 million, though, to pay severances to all of the Altus employees we laid off and to bribe the government of Val Verde to prevent Peter Petrawicki from suing us. Eventually, Val Verde kicked Peter off the island, and he had to go back to living in the California suburb where he grew up.

  It wasn’t until he stopped that we could see the full scope of what Carl’s brother had been doing. After we broke Altus, a full 2 percent of active social media accounts never posted again. That included The Thread, but also a number of other similar YouTube channels. My theory is that Carl’s brother was building audiences all over the internet and was planning to pit them against each other somehow. Or maybe he was just going to use them, turn them into his followers and keep them perpetually satisfied.

  But he stopped, and that meant we had succeeded. I think.

  Whatever we were doing, we were on a path that didn’t include us destroying ourselves or being taken over by a relentless ever-present god AI.

  So Altus was gone, The Thread had disappeared, April was back, everything was perfect, and I was so goddamn angry.

  I did a pretty good job of ignoring my constant, smoldering frustration. But it was there, always grating on me, always waiting to be fed a little more fuel. I was so good at not looking at it that it took me a long time to figure out what it even was.

  I have some fiercely amazing friends, and I’ve tried to follow in their footsteps, but I am not as smart as Miranda, or as self-aware as April has become, or as insightful as Maya has always been. Just for the moment, though, I’m going to try to be all of those things, even if I’m just pretending.

  I spent the time between April’s death and the end of Altus trying out pretty much every way humans feel valuable.

  I got famous, I got rich, I was adored, I hung out with fancy folks, I helped people, I tried to change the world for the better, I made my friends laugh, I had powerful peop
le tell me I was worthwhile, I wielded tremendous influence.

  I tried everything, so you’ll excuse me if, at this point, I feel like enough of an expert to present you with:

  ANDY SKAMPT’S SIMPLE LIST OF THE WAYS PEOPLE FEEL VALUABLE

  1. Just Believing It

  Sometimes this is religious; sometimes it is not. God cares for everyone, but society is supposed to as well. We strive to live in a world that places tremendous, even infinite value on a single human life. We do not live in that society, but I think part of the reason we strive for it is because we need to signal that our existence is intrinsically meaningful. This is the only source of meaning that does not rely on other people; it is also the hardest one to hold on to.

  2. Story

  We understand ourselves in complex ways, but oftentimes that can be distilled down into some core identities. And we imagine these identities as part of a story, and that that story is some intrinsically positive thing. It might be being part of a tradition, or breaking free of one. It might be your race or height or hair color. Your status as a child or a parent. Being a job creator or a Star Wars fan or a snowboarder. We create positive narratives around these things, and when we fit in them, we feel like we matter.

  3. Being Appreciated

  It might be hearing someone laugh at your joke, or being paid a living wage, or getting likes on Instagram. It might be only external, or it might also come from within. Appreciation is almost synonymous with value, and I think this is where most meaning comes from.

  4. Helping People

  This might sound the same as appreciation, but it’s not. Indeed, I think your average wastewater-treatment engineer will tell you that you can help a lot of people and not get a ton of thanks for it. But we are empathy machines, and one of the most lasting and true ways of finding meaning is to actually be of service.

  5. Comparison

  You know, keeping up with the Joneses. Also, every sport. But it’s more than just comparing ourselves to other people; we also compare our current selves to our past selves, which is why getting better at something makes us feel valuable, even if we’re the only ones who really understand how much we’re improving.

  6. Impacting the World

  This one is simple, but so dangerous. If the world is different because you are in it, then you must matter. You must be important if things changed because you exist. But if that’s what you believe, then the bigger the impact, the more you matter, and that can lead to some bad places.

  * * *

  —

  You might think that this list is too long or too short, and who knows, maybe it is. You might think that I missed a big one, like “Belonging.” But I think belonging is just mutual appreciation of shared identity. It’s like a feedback loop of appreciating someone for an identity you share, which makes you appreciate yourself.

  Also, these things are never felt in isolation from each other. A schoolteacher gains meaning from:

  1. Seeing the impact they have on their students.

  2. Being part of the story of teaching.

  3. Helping their students.

  4. Being a better teacher this year than they were last year.

  5. Being appreciated for their work (god willing).

  And I find that it is much easier to believe in your intrinsic value if you are getting all these other signals that you have value.

  I spent weeks working all of this out for a reason. I was mad and I wanted to know why, and now it’s really obvious to me. Compared to my former self, I was just much less. I had gone from being a billionaire back to being just merely well-off. April had taken my identity as her surrogate by existing again. The end of The Thread had dramatically diminished my ability to impact the world. And on top of all of that, I had spent months actually trying to help people, only to abandon that brand the moment something shinier came along.

  I was so mad, and I was mad that I was mad.

  And it didn’t escape my notice that I was the only person being directly manipulated by both Carl and their brother. On The Thread, One was working constantly to get me addicted to Altus and to get me to tie my identity to it. Carl, meanwhile, was betting that I would be able to overcome that temptation. Or, more likely, they were betting that it wouldn’t matter. And it hadn’t. If it were up to me, I probably wouldn’t have let Miranda break Altus, and that fact tore at me every day.

  This whole time, I was also dealing with the same Altus withdrawal that millions of people were dealing with, so, basically, life sucked.

  And every day it became clearer and clearer that Altus was never coming back, and every day I got angrier and angrier about it. I didn’t know whether to be mad at my friends for destroying it, at Carl for setting me up to fall in love with it, or at myself for being so easy to manipulate into loving something terrible. Over and over again, every night I kept my mouth shut.

  But then, finally, a couple of months after Altus shut down, I couldn’t do it anymore.

  Andy: I’m mad. I’ve been mad the whole time. I can’t stop.

  April: What?

  Andy: About Altus. I miss it. It’s gone. I know you did what you had to do, but I’m still mad.

  April: I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that, Andy.

  This made me even angrier, but maybe it was the right kind of anger. Maybe the fire couldn’t go out until it burned up its fuel.

  Andy: Maybe I just need you to know. I thought we were going to get control of Altus . . . to do good things with it. Not just destroy it. I don’t know why we got to make this decision for so many people.

  April: OK, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I’m mad that you’re mad because this is something that I don’t know if I did right. But we had to do something. I wish I had your support. But I guess I understand if I don’t.

  I didn’t write back for a while and then, finally, a wall of text appeared.

  April: The problem with Altus wasn’t how it was run or who was running it, it was that whoever was running it would instantly be too powerful. If someone had to be that powerful, you’d be close to the top of my list. We’re good people, but I don’t even trust us. Power concentrates naturally, but that concentration is, by itself, a problem. We made a choice for a lot of people, but that choice wasn’t just “You can’t have Altus anymore,” it was “One tiny group of people will not be in charge of the future.” We had to do it for Carl reasons, but even without that it was the right thing. I really believe that. Altus was an invasion. They wanted to be the future, I think that was why they were so dangerous. The most impactful thing you can do with power is almost always to give it away.

  I read that paragraph several times before I wrote back.

  Andy: Did Maya help you write that? Because it’s really good.

  April: Fuck you!

  April: And yes.

  Andy: I’m going to think about this. Thank you for dealing with me.

  April: Literally any time.

  I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s very important to have friends who are smarter than you . . . and who are also kind to you.

  I turned to Bex, who was lying on the bed beside me. “Why didn’t you give up on me?”

  “Shut up, Andy,” she said. “Go to sleep.”

  MIRANDA

  So I saved the world, huh? I mean, not just me, but it’s a little hard to feel like a complete phony when humanity would definitely have been doomed without you. That doesn’t mean that I don’t still sometimes feel like a fraud, but it’s nice to have a solid touchstone.

  Also, I get to do really cool stuff now.

  * * *

  —

  I went back to Berkeley, where Professor Lundgren had, once again, kept my lab bench in place and available. And there she and I started doing something pretty dangerous and very secret—we took Altus’s source code and tried to use
it to figure out how it worked.

  What became clear pretty quickly was that no one at Altus had written the code and, indeed, no human had written it. Much of it was completely indecipherable. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t find anything useful.

  * * *

  —

  We were able to determine that the changes Carl made to our brains to allow us to receive and transmit data into their network were observable and permanent. And we were able to determine that even children born after the Dream stopped happening had those changes. What we were not able to find was any trace of the computational system Carl’s brother was, theoretically, still using to observe us.

  We knew it was there, but whatever systems Carl used to turn our biosphere into a planetwide computer were too elegant for us to even perceive. You’d almost think it wasn’t there, which I guess is the point.

  * * *

  —

  We all dropped our Altus nicknames when we got back to Berkeley. And I say “we” because the first people I hired onto my research team (yes, I had a research team now) were Paxton and Sid.

  I was trying to get them to go for runs with me, though they were more successful in getting me to play D&D with them.

  But I did succeed in getting them to help me do amazing research. We teased out the barest bits of how the Altus Space worked. From that, we got little insights that could potentially help push brain-computer interfaces forward by ten or even fifteen years.

  And then, after we were fairly certain that we’d gotten most of the low-hanging fruit from our analysis of the alien code, y’know what we did? We destroyed it. We took every single hard drive that had ever touched that stuff, and we put them in a truck, and we drove that truck to a facility that can smash anything into powder. And then each of us took turns throwing drives into the maw of this giant grinder that was built specifically to destroy hard drives. The drives split and bounced and ripped apart until they finally fell through to the other side, where they were nothing more than jangling pieces of plastic, silicon, and metal. We each took one little piece back to the lab with us, where they sit above our lab stations.