An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

by Hank Green

  “Yeah, I get it, dude’s a genius and he sucks. So what do we do?” I asked. No one said anything for a moment.

  “Well, I have no idea,” Robin said, which must have been physically painful for him. Not being able to help was his least favorite feeling in the world. “To be honest with you I don’t even know very much about the Dream.”

  “Me either,” I replied. Everyone looked surprised.

  “Really?” Robin said.

  “Yeah,” Andy added, “I would have assumed you’d be all over it. Mysteries are your thing! You were a freaking pet detective.”

  “What?” Miranda and Robin said simultaneously.

  “I’ll tell you guys about it later. It’s just . . . It’s weird when there are billions of other people on the case. I just feel like my efforts are better spent elsewhere. The chances of me uncovering a unique passcode are, like, nil. So, Miranda, I guess you’re the only one of us who spends much time in the Dream.”

  “Uhhhh . . . no, it stresses me out. Once I start on a puzzle, I can’t stop, and then I stop having normal dreams. You still wake up rested, which doesn’t make any sense and is probably impossible, but I don’t like waking up frustrated. I just wake myself up and then go back to bed and sleep like a normal person for the rest of the night.

  “I’ve felt like my time is better spent working on the output. The passcodes are spitting out hex code, which people have figured out can be compiled sensically into a vector image. That’s, like, an image that is made up of math.”

  “Hah, yeah, Andy and I are VERY aware of what vector images are.”

  “Oh, right, designers!” Miranda said. “Well, anyway, the problem is that every time a new string of code gets added, the image changes shape completely. It’s basically a big mess of interrelating math, so whenever anything is added, everything changes. No piece of code is at all useful without all of them.”

  “Do they know how many there are?” I asked, genuinely surprised that I didn’t know any of this yet.

  “Probably,” Miranda said. “There’s no way to know if it’s actually following the image format perfectly, but if it is, then there are 4,096 total fragments of code. But, again, I don’t know anything about the Dream itself, only about what it’s been spitting out.”

  “OK, so none of us spend time in the Dream. Do we trust anyone who does?” Andy asked.

  There was an active Wikipedia page of completed puzzles. So far more than five hundred had been solved. I kept tabs on it both because I wanted to see how it was going and because the list contained the names (or screen names) of people who had assisted in solving puzzles. If you sorted by that number, the top ten names or so had become fairly well-known among people who even peripherally followed the Dream. At number three, with sole or shared credit on eleven confirmed passcodes, was ThePurrletarian.

  “Um, well,” I said, “never mind.”

  “OK, that’s not how sentences work,” Andy said. “Once you say ‘um, well,’ you’ve committed yourself to finishing the thought.”

  “I think Maya may be ThePurrletarian.”

  “What?” Andy almost shouted.

  Robin and Miranda were quiet. They knew of Maya, but they’d never met her.

  “And why do you think this?” Andy asked.

  “It’s a secret?”

  Robin broke in here from inside the computer. “Do you want to contact her, to ask what she thinks about this situation?”

  “Is she online?” I asked.

  “Um, yeah, should I go chat with her?” Andy was hesitant.

  “Good god, she’s my ex, not a hell demon. Just add her!” I half shouted in a loud monotone.

  And then there she was. She was sitting on her bed in our apartment. Or, rather, my old apartment. I suddenly worried about how she was paying rent. Had I screwed her over? I hadn’t even thought about it. Sweat leapt out of my skin.

  She was leaning on the same big blue pillows with the same Hundertwasser print hanging up over her bed frame. It was just so . . . the same. I wondered if she had a new roommate. I wondered how things were going at her job. I wondered if she was bitter that Andy and I had gotten rich and she hadn’t. I wondered if she hated me. Then I realized, of course she did, and wondered how much.

  “Hello?” she said, looking around at all of us with a mix of concern, skepticism, and maybe a bit of resignation. It was the first time we’d talked since I left her apartment. She didn’t look angry; she did look annoyed.

  “Hey, um,” I replied, unable to think of what else to say.

  Andy took over for me: “Are you ThePurrletarian?”

  “Goddamn it, April,” she almost whispered. “What did you tell them?”

  “That you might be ThePurrletarian, that’s all.” If weakening her secret identity was what she was going to be mad at me about, I felt like I was getting off very easy.

  She looked resigned, not angry—at least, not at that moment.

  “After . . .” And then she had to restart. “I got the Dream before almost anybody. The first night I had it, I solved four sequences. I knew it wasn’t just a dream. It’s . . . It’s amazing in there.”

  I felt a little guilty that I had spent so little time exploring the Dream then. I spent all my time defending it, but also I avoided it.

  “Are you going to introduce your friends?”

  “Oh god! I’m sorry. Maya, this is Miranda, a materials scientist at UC Berkeley who we’ve been working with, and Robin, who is my assistant,” I said.

  Andy then cut in, “It’s really good to see you, Maya.”

  “It’s good to see you too.”

  If you want yet another example of what a shit I am, I hadn’t even considered that I’d basically made Andy choose and that he had chosen me. Another wave of heat and sweat hit me. Luckily, Andy took over and told Maya the situation with Petrawicki.

  “Oh, yeah, do not give into that rat-faced shit. Seriously, if every person got a nickel every time someone else thought something nasty about them, that guy would be the richest man on earth.”

  “Right, no one wants to give in, but we have to do something or he’s in control.”

  “First of all, no, he’s not. All the more complicated clues require collaboration now anyway. Yesterday there was a passcode uncovered and the key was to have someone who spoke a particular dialect of Hindi and had knowledge of their region’s creation myth working with someone who knows abstract mathematics. I was following the whole saga and I still don’t really understand. It was something about circles, both geometrical and mythological. It really shows an amazingly detailed understanding of human culture. And, for all their strengths, the Defenders don’t necessarily seem like the most culturally aware group of people.”

  There was a round of agreement.

  “But more importantly,” she continued, “we can fuck with them.”

  “Oh, I like the sound of that,” I said.

  “It takes time to check a passcode to ensure that it’s real. You can’t just pop into the Dream, say the passcode, and get the data. You have to go through the whole puzzle sequence, get the password in the Dream, and then deliver it. Some of the puzzle sequences take hours.”

  “Oh, this is delicious,” I said. “So we just have to set up a racket of people who send Peter Petrawicki fake puzzle sequences and hex codes hundreds of times a day.”

  “No,” Maya said, “you don’t need to do anything. People active in the Dreamer community are already working on it. When I say ‘we’ can fuck with them, I mean us, not you. No offense, but I don’t think you could come up with a convincing fake puzzle sequence to save your life.”

  I did not take offense. I saw myself as a leader of the community, not a member. I had no idea what a messed-up perspective that was at the time. “Oh, so, we don’t have to do anything. This problem will solve itself.”
>
  I saw frustration bloom on Maya’s face. “No, April, this problem will get solved by people who just happen to not be you.”

  Everyone got a little wide-eyed with that rebuke. Miranda blushed bright red, while my guess is that my face went a shade whiter.

  “Right,” I stammered. “Of course. God, I’m sorry, that was a dumb thing to say.”

  Maya just made that face where her lips disappeared in consternation. I hadn’t been called on my bullshit in a while. It was unpleasant but also a little refreshing.

  “If you don’t mind me asking,” Robin said, “how did you get so involved in the Dreamer community?”

  “Well, the first night I solved the forty-ninth-, fiftieth-, and fifty-first-floor puzzle sequences. The forty-ninth floor, that’s the floor you started on, was solved by hundreds of people by the time people realized that it was a shared experience. I had worked out those three and even a few outside the building when the first Dreamer communities started popping up. It made me a bit of a celebrity in those communities. It also didn’t hurt that I had the connection to April.” She nodded at me. “Now, I just like it, and the people are amazing, and from all over the world with different ideas and worldviews, all working together toward a common goal. It’s a pretty beautiful thing. In fact, you all should spend a little time in the Dream. Just look up one of the solved sequences on Wikipedia and go through it. It might give you a better appreciation for the Carls. I know it has for me.”

  Then she sat there for a few moments with a thought on her face before saying, “And, yeah, I dunno, I probably wanted to stay involved in this stuff in some way. It wasn’t as easy for me to leave it behind as I thought it would be.”

  I could tell she was looking right at me. I couldn’t find any words to say, and I was worried that, if I said them, she would be able to hear the lump in my throat.

  “Speaking of which, I didn’t originally want to ask, but there’s something you guys could maybe help us out with, if you wanted to.”

  * * *

  —

  That night, after mulling over Maya’s proposal, I decided to take her advice and spend some time in the Dream. First, though, I read through some of the more recent puzzle sequences that had been worked out. The one I picked was one of the last ones ThePurrletarian had credited, though there were two other names I didn’t recognize listed beside hers. They didn’t uncover it simultaneously, I found; they did it together.

  When I fell asleep and found myself in the Dream’s lobby, I turned around and punched the down button on the elevator. The door opened, and I walked in and pushed the button for the lobby. I walked out, past the massive super-sized Carl, out the door, and onto the street. The Dream’s streets were not on a grid like Manhattan; they would spur off in diagonals, coming together in three-way or five-way or even six-way intersections. Alleys shot off in surprising locations, and none of the architecture made any sense.

  I looked back to see the office building where the spawn point was located—so high that, from my vantage point, it looked like it went on up forever, more than two hundred stories. It’s weird to talk about these things as if they are fact since they were in a dream, but the fact that everyone experienced it in precisely the same way made it feel concrete. What is reality except for the things that people universally experience the same way? The Dream, in that sense, was very, very real.

  Directly across from the exit of the office building was the Arby’s. This magnificent dream location was the best branding Arby’s had ever gotten; they’d become the unofficial fast food of Dreamers everywhere. Next door to that was the old wooden church and on the other side of the Arby’s was a train car that was definitely not modern, but I couldn’t tell you when it was from. Maybe the 1920s?

  I headed straight across into the Arby’s. It was empty, as everything in the Dream was. This sequence relied on a fairly detailed knowledge of how the equipment in an Arby’s worked. Maya had worked at an Arby’s in high school and was also one of the first people to try this sequence.

  On the counter next to the cash register was a Chicken Bacon & Swiss sandwich, a large drink, and one of those folded apple-pie things. I went behind the counter and punched the corresponding buttons on the cash register to ring up the meal. The cash register tray opened, revealing a bunch of money that I would not have recognized but knew from reading about it online was from Pakistan. The money, to my eyes, was useless, but a Pakistani Dreamer who Maya had found online determined that a number of letters were missing from the notes. Those missing letters spelled out the Urdu words for “floor” and “under.” This remained a mystery for a couple of days until another Dreamer had the idea to bring a pry bar from a nearby auto shop and start prying up floor tiles. Just by the cash register, where you would stand if you were ordering, they pried up a tile where, underneath, a passkey glowed in bright blue letters: “Double picture day.”

  I didn’t need the pry bar. If you knew which tile it was, you could just lift it with your fingernails. I had the passcode now, but I didn’t see any reason to go and turn it in. That would just wake me up and give me a hex sequence that everyone had known for weeks. Instead, I started walking around the city. I recognized the styles of about one in every three buildings. There was a craftsman home, a brownstone, a bunch of churches—some old-looking, some very old-looking, some new. There was a strip mall and an Italian villa, and there were temples and mosques. I did my best not to go in a straight line. I got myself well and truly lost. I turned down alleys and wound through streets both narrow and broad. Eventually, if I did this all night, I would just wake up.

  So that’s what I did. I walked and walked and walked until I hit the end of the city. It was abrupt; it ended in grass, grass that went on forever. I walked out into the grass. There was no path, no trees, no hills, just an infinite flat plane of close-shorn grass. Like the most boring golf course of all time. I looked up at a noise in the sky. A jet plane was coming down for a landing. Was there an airport in the city? I didn’t know where you’d put it, but I also didn’t see why not. It was odd, the first moving object I’d seen. The eeriness of the Dream city was mostly its lack of occupants, but there was also no weather—no clouds, no discernible temperature, even. The sun was locked, unmoving in the blue sky. Nothing moved. Except that plane, I guess.

  I set out into the grass and kept walking until I woke up. It was morning. My feet felt fine, I was well rested, and more than anything I wanted to talk to Maya.

  The Dream, this creation of the Carls, it had been there for me to enjoy and I’d been ignoring it because I didn’t feel like I was going to get anything useful done. So what, though? It was marvelous. Just working through what other people had done gave me a feeling that this was all actually worth it. When you get stuck fighting small battles, it makes you small. Hopping from cable news show to cable news show to discuss controversy after controversy had made me small. I thought only about the fight, not why I was fighting.

  I opened Skype. Maya was online. I clicked on her name and then closed my computer and, instead, recorded a video about how we weren’t going to let the Defenders’ tactics close down the open discussion of the Dream, and that we were going to be working with some well-known Dreamers to create a tool that would help with just that effort.

  The month of April, generally

  @AprilMaybeNot: What if there was a place designed for Dreamers by Dreamers to help solve through sequences, what would your top feature requests be?

  By this time, there were millions of people active in the Dreamer community, and keeping track of not just the solved sequences but also which were unsolved or in progress was a lot of work. There were also hundreds of message boards where people went to seek out people who might have useful skills or information for in-progress sequences. Some of these sites were built on existing platforms like Reddit, Facebook, and Quora; others were hacked together from forum or chat software.<
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  All these efforts were duplicated across literally hundreds of sites. Maya had the idea that I (and Andy) had two things no one else had:

  The attention of far more Carl aficionados than anyone else in the world, as well as the credibility to go with it.

  A huge pile of cash.

  Of course, there were tons of developers and engineers and coders who were happy to try to cobble together something useful for the Dreamer community in their spare time. But as long as no one was getting paid, everyone wanted to be in charge. Maya had identified this problem, but Miranda (along with money from me and Andy) was the one who solved it.

  Miranda kept telling me she was a shit coder, and honestly it really wasn’t her area of expertise, but as we tossed around this idea, it was Miranda, over and over again, who would say, “No, that’s not feasible” or “Yeah, that will take like fifteen minutes.” She knew the difference between a hard problem and an easy one in a way that perplexed the rest of us. And when we brought on our first programmer, Andy’s roommate, Jason, Miranda was the person who understood both the vision and the practicality enough that it made sense for her to be managing Jason.

  And that’s how we (and by “we,” I mostly mean Maya, Miranda, and money) created the Som.

  The Som was a centralized location for Dreamers to share their skills, their projects, their theories, their failures, and their successes. It started out just as a website, but Jason coded it so that it could easily be integrated with an app. We started poaching people from my old job.

  Soon, a Som app could be set to notify a user instantaneously if someone was looking for their skill set or if a comment was added to a theory thread they were following. By the end of a month, the whole thing was so interconnected and bloated with features that it was impenetrable to the average user. But it wasn’t for average users; it was for hard-core Dreamers, and it may have been a little glitchy, but it was better than any of the other cobbled-together solutions by a wide margin.