An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

by Hank Green

  I sat back in the chair. There was a pattern here, but I wasn’t seeing it. I did not think it odd that I was having what appeared to be conscious, lucid experiences while dreaming, and I never did feel that way while in the Dream. It seemed weird after I woke up, but never while I was there.

  Anyway, I gave up. I decided that this dream was dumb and I was going to wake up and end it. The way I’d done that in the past was to talk to the robot in the lobby, so I headed back. Just as I approached the door, I turned around to give the room one last look, which was when I saw it.

  The cubicles were laid out in a six-by-four grid.

  From there, it was pretty simple. The grid showed the location of the next desk it wanted me to go to. The orientation was clear from the red-block desk, so I just went to the one represented by the blue block. Voilà, an orange block appeared, I went to the orange-block desk, then purple, then green, then pink, then red, and soon I had visited every desk but one.

  So I sat down at it, thinking maybe something fantastic would happen. But it didn’t. I just opened up the file, and instead of the grid was a phrase: “Fancy tulip man.”

  I pretty much ran to the front desk. Was I going to meet Carl? Was the robot at the desk going to give me some grand reward? Had I moved past the first test of the Freddie Mercury Sequence only to solve another test so quickly?

  “Hello,” it said as I approached.

  “Hello, yes,” I blurted. “I’m here to see Carl.”

  “Do you have a passcode?”

  “Fancy tulip man.”

  And I woke up. Pretty furious. Of course it had been nothing—why would it be anything else? It was a dream. I was exhausted both physically and emotionally. My life had been turned inside out and upside down and then blended, spiced, spliced, and rebranded. Of course I was going to have weird dreams. And on top of all that, I was singing that damn song. Except now it had words: “Six, seven, six, four, five, F, zero, zero, four, D, six, one, seven, four.”

  I went to sleep singing the song, knowing it was absurd, but too tired and disappointed to care.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning the federal government announced that they would be restricting the area around all the Carls in the US, citing a very vague, low-level public health concern. The entire block was to be restricted. The federal government was going to be paying all the businesses there in the meantime to compensate for their losses. Only people who lived on that block would be allowed in (which, hooray, included me).

  They did not, however, confirm that Carl was an alien.

  Nonetheless, this set off a huge round of speculation, and as I was the closest thing to a Carl expert, my following exploded every time I posted something even semi-sensical about the situation. I was calm and carefully laid hints that I knew more than everyone else, even though, at that point, I had pretty much spilled all the beans . . . all of my beloved and terrifying beans. A piece of advice: When you have beans like the ones I had, you should probably be more careful with them than I was.

  But then, suddenly I got some more beans.

  Robin came over that morning to try to help me understand why I needed to form a corporation. It was all taxes and liability and insurance and mortgages, and I hated it all so much. I was humming under my breath while trying to not think about literally anything else when Robin stopped talking and started staring at me like my skin had turned purple.

  “Where did you hear that song?” Robin asked. This was unusual for him. He seemed pretty driven to keep our relationship professional, so I was a little taken aback that he’d ask a question that wasn’t relevant to work.

  “Honestly? I think I made it up during a dream. It’s weird, right?”

  If my skin was purple before, Robin was now looking at me like it was made of molten lava.

  “Are you OK?”

  “Can you tell me more about this dream?”

  “I mean, yeah, it’s weird. I’ve had a similar one four different times. I’m in the lobby of a weird fancy office building . . .”

  And then he finished for me: “. . . and there’s a robot receptionist, and there’s a weird catchy song playing, the song you were just singing.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “I’ve been having that dream for days, April. Every time I try to talk to the robot . . .”

  And then I finished for him: “. . . it asks for a passcode, and if you don’t have one, you wake up.”

  “If you don’t have one?”

  “Yeah!” I got excited. I knew more than Robin. “I solved a puzzle in the dream, and it gave me a passcode. I went to the receptionist, and I came away singing, ‘Six, seven, six, four, five, F, zero, zero, four, D, six, one, seven, four.’”

  “That is . . .” He didn’t need to finish.

  “Andy and Miranda!!” I shouted.

  “What?”

  “Andy was humming the song when we were in LA,” I said as I was getting out my phone to call. It rang twice before he picked up.

  “April,” Andy answered.

  “Hold on, I’m going to add Miranda to the call.” I did.

  “Hello?” Miranda asked.

  “Hey, guys, have you ever had a dream where you’re in the lobby of a fancy office building and there’s a robot receptionist and it asks you for a passcode and there’s catchy lounge music playing?”

  It was very quiet.

  “That’s . . . ,” Miranda said.

  And then another few seconds passed before Andy said, “April . . .”

  I kept not talking while they processed.

  “What the fuck,” Andy finally concluded.

  “Both of you have had this dream.”

  “Yes,” they simultaneously concluded.

  There was a long silence while I waffled between giddy excitement and fear.

  “Robin is on speaker with me, he has also had it. Have any of you explored outside of the reception area?”

  They hadn’t. I told them about the puzzle and the weird string of letters and numbers.

  “I suddenly want to go to sleep very, very badly,” said Andy.

  “April, can you repeat the code you got again?” Miranda’s voice came out tinny from the phone’s speaker.

  “Six, seven, six, four, five, F, zero, zero, four, D, six, one, seven, four.” It had stuck in my head so thoroughly that I didn’t even have to pause.

  “It sounds like hex.”

  “OK, what’s that?” Robin said.

  “Hexadecimal. Like, our numbers are in base ten. Hexadecimal numbers are in base sixteen. In computer programming, every number up to sixteen is represented by a different symbol. So, it’s like zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, A, B, C, D, E, F.”

  “What?” I said.

  “It’s not super easy to explain,” she responded. “It’s one of the very basic ways computers talk. It’s better because sixteen is two to the fourth power, and computers only talk in twos.”

  “Still not making sense, but we believe you,” Andy said.

  “OK, I guess the most important thing to ask is, is this just us?” I said.

  “Who is most tired?” Robin asked.

  “Probably April,” Miranda said, at the same time Andy said, “April,” at the same time I said, “Me?”

  “Right, that was maybe a dumb question. April, can you go to sleep?”

  “I mean, almost always.”

  “OK, that’s your job. See what you can find out. The rest of us are going to do a bunch of research and see if we can figure out who else is having this dream and what it means. It all seems impossible.”

  “I agree it is not possible,” said Miranda.

  “And yet!” Andy added.

  “OK, I’m going to go to bed! Good luck, everyone!”

&
nbsp; * * *

  —

  When I was in middle and high school, I earned some extra money by finding people’s lost pets. The town in Northern California where we lived had about fifty thousand people, most of whom lived within a few square miles of each other. It started when I was volunteering at the Humane Society. I would walk dogs, spray out cages, clean litter boxes, and “socialize” (play with) the animals. Pretty great work, but it didn’t pay.

  With fair regularity, a dog or cat would show up at the shelter and within the day someone would call asking after the pet. It was always a wonderful feeling, reuniting the pet with its owner. But we also got a lot of calls from people whose pets we did not have. I took this pretty hard. The employees at the shelter advised me to not get too involved, but I hated the idea that there was some beloved animal out there, crouched under a porch, maybe hurt or sick but almost definitely scared. And then there were the owners—often kids were involved. These people would do anything to get their pets back, including offering rewards.

  Being a pet detective definitely sounds like a fake job, but I googled it and there were real people who did it. I emailed a bunch of them, saying I was doing a project for school, and interviewed them to find out more about their business. One woman was particularly candid, telling me that the real trick of being a professional pet detective was to get paid whether you found the pet or not, and definitely to get paid if you happened to find the pet after it had died. This, apparently, was fairly common. Pets get caught and stuck and starve, they stumble into traps meant for raccoons or foxes, and, more than anything, they get hit by cars.

  I was fourteen, so I didn’t get paid by the day or anything, but I did always call the number to tell them I was on the case and to confirm that I would get a reward whether I found the pet alive or dead.

  For the most part, this is extremely boring work. You learn as much as you can about the pet, its habits, and its fears, and then you walk up and down busy streets hoping to not find that the worst happened.

  Most cases were boring, and the success of the occasional live-pet discovery was worth way more than the $200 rewards I’d get. Though, to be clear, the $200 rewards were a pretty big deal for me. But I had a few cases that were actually intriguing—cases with clues and odd characters and some legitimate human drama. It’s very important to learn a good bit about the owners. A surprising number of lost pets are actually stolen pets, usually by a friend or family member, often as some kind of retribution.

  One of my weirdest cases stretched on for months. I was 90 percent sure that Andrea Vander’s Maine coon cat, Bitters, had just wandered off one day and found a different family. This happens occasionally with outdoor cats; they find someone they like better and just stop coming home. Andrea Vander was not a particularly lovely person, and if I were a cat, I probably also would have found a different home. But I’d knocked on every door within a half mile and found no sign of Bitters. I was at Vander’s house one day, pretty much ready to give up the case, when some food was delivered by a young woman in her twenties.

  I watched as Andrea Vander, with great care, counted out the exact change of her delivery order, leaving zero cents extra for a tip.

  “That looks good,” I said to Ms. Vander after the delivery driver had gone. “How often do you order from there?”

  “Every day,” she said.

  The next day, I ordered some food from that restaurant. The same delivery driver showed up at my house, and I made her a deal. I wouldn’t say or do anything at all if Bitters showed up at my front door in the next twenty-four hours. If that didn’t happen, she could expect to see me asking questions around her neighborhood very soon.

  “She’s just so awful!” the woman whined.

  “Shhhh . . . ,” I advised her.

  Now, look, I know this doesn’t sound very high-stakes, but Bitters was home, I got my $200, and everyone was happy.

  I tell you this story because, by the age of sixteen, I considered myself something of a talented detective. And at twenty-three, I figured I must be even better. I had solved and implemented the Freddie Mercury Sequence before anyone else even knew it existed. Of course, I did that with help, but that’s part of what a good detective does. I was feeling pretty proud of myself.

  So when I finally got my ass to sleep after an hour of tossing and turning, I was ready to take the Dream on headfirst. I started out by wandering through the parts of the office building I could explore, avoiding only the receptionist, who seemed to be good at waking you up.

  The door to the puzzle room was one way out of the reception area, but there was maybe another: An elevator stood on the opposite wall. I hadn’t considered it at first, but if I could go into the office, why not try that?

  I pushed the down button and the elevator door opened immediately. It was a normal elevator, nothing special except the number of buttons. They climbed up both sides of the door, higher than I could reach. I thought about going up, but I’d already pushed down, so instead I punched the button for the ground floor. I had already looked out the window of the building onto the peculiar city; I wanted to see if maybe I could get into it.

  The elevator opened into the cavernous lobby of a fancy office building. They all look different, but they all look the same. The floor was marble; the ceiling was thirty feet up. There were tables with flower arrangements, a big desk where security and check-in would go, art on the walls, and, in the center of the room, blown up double-sized, towering over the whole thing, was Carl.

  Well, that was one mystery solved. Any chance that this was a somehow-unrelated impossible mystery was gone now.

  What was conspicuously absent from the whole thing was people. Office building lobbies are central stations of human activity and movement. This place looked like it had been sucked out of reality and put into some kind of museum exhibit: “Here is an example of early twenty-first-century high-rise lobby design and decor. You can see the emphasis on stonework contrasted with meticulously maintained flower arrangements. The hard and the soft, the permanent and the ephemeral, but both costly, giving those who occupied the space a sense of high-class luxury.”

  In fact, I would later note that the Dream’s entire landscape looked like some kind of diorama, constructed as a place to observe, not as one to occupy.

  Anyhow, I overcame the desire to explore and instead moved through the giant room and then through the door. Outside was, again, a tremendous stillness, but an assault of conflicting styles. Directly across the street was an Arby’s, but not, like, a city Arby’s smashed into a row of retail storefronts. A free-standing normal-America Arby’s surrounded by its parking lot. Next door to the Arby’s, surrounded by a swath of knee-high grass, was a wooden church-looking building. No cross capped its steeple, but the slatted wood and the double doors centered on the front of the building made the sense that it was a house of worship clear.

  None of these buildings alone looked weird; they were just dramatically out of each other’s context, especially considering the massive marble lobby I had just walked out of. I turned around to look at the building. After a few years living in New York City, you look up less, but now I craned my neck up and found that as high as I could see, there was no end to the height of the building I had just exited. I kept leaning back to try to see farther. Suddenly I stumbled, and then lurched to the side, and then was awake.

  My phone was ringing. It was Andy.

  “Why did you wake me up, dick! I was out of the building. There’s a whole city. There’s an Arby’s!”

  “Yeah, I know. Look, it’s not just us, and it’s spreading. It’s spreading fast.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The sequence you solved . . . they’re calling them sequences . . . the one on the floor with the receptionist, that one’s already been solved, but it’s pretty cool that you did it on your own.”

  “What? Goddamn it, Andy, you have to expla
in things before talking.” I was still groggy.

  “The Dream, it’s full of these weird riddles and puzzles and clues. Somehow we missed it, but there are dozens of communities online talking about it already. The one you solved was the first one that got solved—no one’s sure who solved it first. It’s weird because it’s a dream and it took a while for people to realize they weren’t the only one. But now people are out in the city solving these puzzles. There’s already a wiki and a subreddit and a bunch of semiprivate chat rooms.”

  This hit me pretty hard. I mean, not that there was a subreddit, just the realization that I was behind. I had been ahead of the game for so long. The fact that the world knew things that I hadn’t figured out . . . that I should have figured out! It was unpleasant for reasons that I, in the moment, did not understand.

  “Hold on, I’m getting another call.” It was Jennifer Putnam. I clicked over.

  “Is this about the Dream?” I asked.

  “It both is and is not,” she said with absolutely no nonsense in her voice.

  “I want to get on some shows today—can you talk to Robin about that? I’m also going to need to get debriefed on this Dream.”

  “Yes, I can make that happen. In the meantime, the president would like to talk to you.”

  After about ten seconds of silence I said, “The president of the United States?” just to clarify.

  “That’s the one. She is going to be calling you soon.”

  “Why?” I suddenly felt calmer, which was bizarre.

  “I got a call from the White House asking for your phone number and that is 100 percent of what I know. I wish I had more. Best of luck, April. This is a pretty wonderful occasion. Expect a bottle of champagne from me.”

  “I’m more of a hard-lemonade kind of girl.”

  “Yes, well, maybe it’ll be a chance to develop a taste for finer things. I’m going to clear your line so they can call you. Good-bye, April.”