An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

by Hank Green

  “No, maybe not right this moment. Suffice to say, Carl is asking for elements, and though there are more common elements out there, he’s asking for the most common isotopes, which, if we’re going to be his couriers, makes our job easier.”

  “Are you for real right now?”

  “In what ways?”

  “Did you just, in five minutes, solve a puzzle that has been devouring every ounce of my mental energy for the last two weeks? I can’t believe I never looked at the citation numbers!”

  “No one ever looks at the citations, don’t worry. Sometimes you just need a fresh pair of eyes.”

  “Yeah, a pair of eyes that have heard of americium.” I didn’t even know that americium was a thing. It was another few days before I saw it written down and realized it was an element named for America, since it’s pronounced like “amer-ISS-ium.”

  “Eyes can’t hear, April! So you’re on TV tonight, right? That’s exciting.”

  “OH MY GOD NO IT’S NOT!”

  She grinned. “Yeah, I guess not.”

  “Hey, Miranda?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You want to go to Walmart with me?”

  * * *

  —

  It was midnight. Our show was on TV, but now that seemed like the least interesting thing in the world. The mystery had eclipsed my obsession with strangers analyzing my performance. I had made a date to meet up with Miranda. She would drive down from San Francisco to meet me at Hollywood Carl after our fancy agent meeting. She was excited to meet Andy as well.

  I got into the big, silky, soft, cool hotel bed and turned off the lights and stared at the insides of my eyelids for about an hour before giving up.

  Miranda was right: I had had the thought before. When something is impossible to explain, you post the GIF of the guy with the hair saying, “ALIENS.” It’s just what you do. I mean, “Don’t Stop Me Now”? No video footage of them showing up? The fact that none of the Carls had been moved, though no one seemed to have tried super hard? The fact that no one, after almost two full weeks, had taken credit or spoken out about what must have been a massive logistical undertaking?

  I think a lot of people thought “extraterrestrial,” and of course plenty of people were saying it on the internet. But no one wanted to be the weirdo advocating for the “It’s aliens!” theory on cable news. You can’t say the word “aliens” without teasing your hair up and bugging your eyes out first.

  So the thought had been there, but it seemed like just a normal “my brain is thinking stupid thoughts” thought.

  But Miranda didn’t seem stupid. She seemed really cool and smart and like she knew an awful lot about material resonance and thermal conductivity . . . things that sounded important and legitimate. She also was clear that maybe it wasn’t aliens; it was just maybe not a bad idea to operate, at least privately, as if it were.

  I would probably have been more skeptical, but I remembered what it was like to touch Carl and it did feel weird—like nothing I’d ever touched before, like when I got semielectrocuted when my house got struck by lightning and I unplugged the TV while the wires were still all overjuiced. Not painful like that, just an entirely new sensation.

  The only other thought I had was that it was some kind of top secret military thing, but why? What did any government have to gain from putting robots in a bunch of places all at once and then leaving an odd Wikipedia trail to three chemical elements? Just to say, “Hey, we can do this! Scary, right?! Don’t mess with us!”? That made some sense . . . but then they would have taken credit, right? I could already feel my eyes bugging out.

  While I was unable to sleep in that glorious bed, I figured out the real reason I was freaking out. Not because we maybe weren’t alone in the universe or because my life was changing forever and I was going to need a new email address. It was because I needed to make a decision. The kind of choice that you only get to make once and you can’t take back and it makes your life totally different, and even if the path is clear, it’s still deeply unsettling.

  Option 1 (the sane option): I could detach from all this as much as possible. Stop doing TV things, definitely do not meet a strange science girl at a Walmart in Southern California to buy smoke detectors, never do anything on the internet ever again, pay off my loans. Buy a big house with a gate with the licensing revenue that would, no doubt, if this were real, keep flowing for the entire rest of my life, and have dinner parties with clever people until I died.

  Option 2 (the not-sane option): Keep doing TV, spice up my Twitter and my Instagram and have opinions. Basically, use the platform that I was given by random chance to have a voice and maybe make a difference. What kind of difference? I had no idea, but I did know another chance like this wasn’t going to come along . . . ever.

  Given the laundry list of other potential culprits, it was difficult to realize that this was the thing that was freaking me out. But once I knew it, I figured the only thing to do was to make the decision, which would then maybe allow me to sleep in that mountain of pillows.

  With my brain full of fear and fog and excitement (and far too impressed with itself), I made my decision. As is often the case, it was the easier choice to make and the more difficult choice to live with.

  Having made that choice, I immediately wanted someone to talk me out of it, so I called Maya.

  She didn’t answer the phone.

  It’s weird looking back on the little insignificant moments that completely change your life and maybe all of human history. There’s one, right there: Maya Didn’t Answer Her Phone That Night. It didn’t go straight to voicemail, so her phone was on—she just didn’t pick up.

  I texted her, I need to talk about some stuff, and then, with one last look at that magnificent bed, I grabbed my laptop, walked out of my room and down the hall, and knocked on Andy’s door. And then I knocked again. The third time, the door opened and Andy stood there looking like I had just taken away the most beautiful thing in his life, which I pretty much had.

  “I have news,” I said.

  “This is reminding me very specifically of another time you woke me up with news.”

  “And that turned out OK, right?”

  “You may be convincing me right now that it didn’t. Please, whatever is happening, can it please, please wait for six hours and twenty-three minutes?”

  “No.” I pushed past him, turned on all the lights, and walked into his hotel room, which, despite Andy having only been in it for a few hours, was a complete mess. “Whoa, was there a bomb in your bag?”

  “I couldn’t find my toothbrush,” he moaned.

  “OK, I need to tell you a few things.”

  We sat on his bed, and I pulled out my phone and read him the email exchange with Miranda.

  He was very quiet after I finished before finally saying, “Carl is an alien?”

  “I know, I realize it sounds absurd, and, look, it’s probably not aliens. I mean, ALIENS! It’s not a real thing that happens.”

  “Yeah, well, there are obviously aliens. The only question is whether they have the technology and desire to visit.”

  “There are obviously aliens?!” I said, a little perplexed.

  “Yeah, I mean, April, do you have any idea how many planets there are in the universe? Literally more than the number of snowflakes that have ever fallen on earth! Or something. I don’t know, it’s a really impressive number. The point is that the odds that intelligent life happened just one time are basically zero.”

  “Oh, so this isn’t such a big deal then?” I ventured.

  “ARE YOU KIDDING? If this is real, it’s the biggest deal in the history of big deals!” He actually yelled at me.

  “Whoa, OK, yes, OK, yes. Yes.” I almost said “OK” again, but I realized I was starting to sound like my brain had broken. So instead I said, “I know this seems unlikely,
but I have more news.”

  “You’re right, it seems unlikely that any other news matters much right now.”

  “I Skyped with Miranda and told her about the Freddie Mercury Sequence and she figured it out.”

  “WHAT?! GODDAMN IT, APRIL!”

  “Why are you mad at me?!”

  “I don’t know! I don’t think I’m mad! I think I’m having a weird and unpleasant dream. Or, if I’m not, then I’m just overwhelmed and tired. This is allowed to be overwhelming, right?”

  “Yes, absolutely. So do you want to know, though?”

  “I mean, yeah.” But he didn’t sound so sure.

  I walked him through Miranda’s thoughts, her discovery in the citations, and that you can apparently buy uranium on Amazon.

  And then I said, “Which is all to say that if you thought we had a scoop before, we now have a very different opportunity and I would like to suggest that we take it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, if I made First Contact with an alien life-form, that’s a bigger deal than me making a viral YouTube video,” I said, using Miranda’s term.

  “And?”

  “And so people are going to talk about this for the rest of time. Maybe we can be a bigger part of the narrative.”

  “We?”

  “Yeah. We.”

  “April, if, if, IF—and it’s a big, huge, Jupiter-sized if—if this is real, it’s going to be way bigger than us. Every world leader is going to be on the news the moment it breaks. No one’s going to listen to you.”

  “Exactly.” I paused. “Unless we work our asses off right now to be out in front of the story. And also, unless we work out and implement the Freddie Mercury Sequence before anyone else.”

  “Oh, do you think there are other people who know?”

  “They’re already talking about it on the talk page of the article. If we get to it first, not only are we the discoverers of New York Carl and the initiators of First Contact with an alien civilization, we’re the ones who worked out the first system they’re using to communicate with humans.”

  “April, are you sure this isn’t a bad idea?”

  “No! In fact, I’m fairly sure that it is. But I have investigated the other possibility, which is leaving this alone and disengaging completely, and that doesn’t sound like any fun at all.”

  “I can’t believe I’m the one trying to talk you out of this . . .”

  “ME EITHER! So stop!”

  “You know that maybe Carl isn’t an alien, right?”

  “Yes, but we’re going to act as if he is. Make decisions as if he is. We’re not going to talk about it, or say it. And if it turns out he’s not, we’ll have invested in the wrong reality. But if he is, we’ll be three steps ahead of everyone.”

  “Is that a good thing to be? Shouldn’t, like, the president be three steps ahead and not a bunch of . . . whatever-we-ares?”

  “I dunno,” I said, honestly. “Let’s just walk through the process and find out.”

  And so we did what we’d been taught to do in school: We built a brand. Branding is something designers think about a lot. You take something like a perfume or a car tire, or butt-flavored bubble gum, and you ask questions about it that you shouldn’t be able to ask. What kind of tuxedo would this car tire wear to the prom? What is this perfume’s favorite movie? You try to end up in a place where you understand a product as if it is a person.

  The reverse of this, where people become brands, should be easy, right? They’re already people . . . End at the beginning. Except that really what you’re doing when you brand is a process of simplification. You come to understand the essence of that fucking tire. And so branding a person also benefits dramatically from simplicity. People are complicated, but brands are simple.

  Marketing is a lot more about thinking than doing. We had to figure out what Carl’s brand was, what my brand was, and how those identities would be a part of each other. We had to think realistically about the role I would play. I wasn’t going to be the president. I wasn’t going to be a national security or science expert. But how we defined me would be informed by how we imagined Carl. We decided that Carl represented power and the future and the “other.” I would represent humanity and weakness and the world Before Carl. I would balance Carl. For all the “This is huge” and “OMG” freak-outs, I could be a balance. Just a small, unassuming civilian who was handling this new reality fine, so you shouldn’t worry too much either. That was an important role that I could fit into, that would be helpful, and that would give us power.

  We basically just followed the advertising-campaign handbook all the way through, but this wasn’t about designing a logo or picking fonts and a color scheme. In fact, we hardly did any of that. What we did have, after a few hours of work, was a plan and three different scripts. The first two were just there to round out the idea of April May. Who she was. That she was smart, kind, and snarky but open to the beauty and wonder of the world. We’d be able to upload them whenever there was time but, more importantly, they defined who we wanted me to be.

  In those videos, we put in little bits about Carl that would be hints to his possible origins. That the Chinese and Russian governments had closed down areas around the Carls rather than moving them, possibly because they were incapable of moving them. But they were mostly about me.

  Then we scripted the video we would release as soon as anyone caught on to the Freddie Mercury Sequence. A video that would show us working out the sequence, going to the store to buy smoke detectors, and presenting Carl with the fruits of our labor. Then, of course, the script ended, because we had no idea what would happen next.

  People would later accuse me of being a careful and calculating marketer using the situation as an opportunity to get rich and famous. I would deny it, saying it was just a bizarre thing that happened to me, but that was a lie. It was a lie that was part of our careful and calculating marketing strategy. If it looked natural from the outside to you, well, then I guess we did a good job. But we were calculating. I liked getting stopped for photos in the airport, I liked getting paid, I liked the attention, and I was worried about it ending. More than worried, honestly, I think deep down I was terrified. At some point that night, I glimpsed my most probable future. That one day, the most interesting and important thing about me would be a thing that I did a long time ago. That I would go on with my life doing boring UX design and people would say, “Oh! You were April May!” to me at parties and job interviews, as if I was once something but not anymore.

  That is the reality I was fleeing from. And I won’t say that I didn’t consider what I was fleeing toward, because we were pretty careful, and I think that paid dividends. But one thing that I didn’t anticipate was that, in creating the April May brand, I was very much creating a new me. You can only do so much pretending before you become the thing you’re pretending to be.

  By the time we were finished skinning all our social media sites, writing scripts, shooting, editing, writing copy, and eating cold Pop-Tarts from a vending machine, it was 10 A.M.

  My phone booped—it was Maya. What’s up hun.

  I was too exhausted to respond. I went back to my room and slept for three hours.

  CHAPTER SIX

  We still had our meeting with Andy’s dad, so we got up at 1 P.M. and our useless bodies dragged our even more useless brains to the car that had been sent for us. We slept through the drive and then walked zombielike into the glass-and-steel building where Marshall Skampt worked. He was a lawyer for an agency, which (as I didn’t understand then but do understand now) is a company that turns fame (and ostensibly talent) into money. Agencies have agents, and agents get work for people who are professional entertainers or creators. If you ever meet an agent, here is what to expect (if they’re any good):

  You will never meet a more effective person.


  If they are talking to you, it’s because you can make them money.

  They’re all assholes, but if you get lucky, you might find one who’s your asshole.

  Sorry, that sounds weird.

  So the meeting with Andy’s dad turned out to be a meeting with Jennifer Putnam, who was apparently a huge deal.

  The building, like a news studio, was clearly built to impress. The difference here was that it worked. I imagine it worked on everyone, but it worked particularly well on me because, after we waited for five minutes in the little lobby drinking cucumber-infused artesian well water, a fashionable young man called our names and we followed him down the hallway and I was trailing the group from the beginning, but about ten feet into our journey I stopped because, half dead and tired as I was, I did not miss the Sherman original in the hallway.

  I had some inkling that most great art is in the hands of private collectors, hiding in places where only a few people get to enjoy it. I understand that that is part of how art works, and I have no problem with it; it was just abstract to me at the time. Like, I didn’t ever expect to see truly great art anywhere but in a museum or in photos online. But here, sitting right in front of my face, was a photograph that at minimum cost tens of thousands of dollars and was worth every penny.

  I imagine agencies make themselves seem impressive to different people in different ways. Maybe some people get off on the in-house movie theater or the embroidered wallpaper. Others might like that every single desk had a large live orchid on it.

  This photograph was aimed at people like me . . . to make us think, Oh, OK, this place is legit.

  Everyone else, of course, kept walking while I froze, staring at the photo. It took them a while to notice I was gone, but eventually the cute assistant guy came back for me.

  “April, I’m sorry we lost you.” His voice was sweet and soft and made me believe it was legitimately their fault I’d been left behind. “What you’re looking at is Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #56, part of her Untitled Film Stills series. Each photograph is of the artist, but she has set herself into various roles with the goal of making it more clear that our culture has constructed ideas of gender that can control us if we let them.”