An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

by Hank Green

  Plus, we just kept throwing money at it as the user base grew. Every time I mentioned the Som in a video, the influx bumped exponentially. And whenever that happened, we needed more help to keep the site running, not to mention just the cost of the servers. Luckily the cost didn’t matter much. Robin and Jennifer Putnam had landed me a ridiculously large advance for my book and I got a quarter of it on signing.

  As the Som got bigger (and it got bigger fast), Miranda just kept being in charge. She was managing Jason, and then she was managing Jason and a couple of app engineers, and then she was bossing around user interface people, data engineers, stack developers, database designers, graphic designers, mobile app developers, and even a couple of accountants. Miranda, it turned out, was not one to focus her expertise. She knew a lot about a LOT.

  Whenever I hung out with Miranda, she never felt like a very confident person. It wasn’t that she was shy; it was more that she was deferential. So the fact that she somehow wrangled this mess together, becoming the twenty-five-year-old CEO of a pretty large tech start-up, astounded me even more than it astounded her. When she was dealing with people who weren’t me, she was friendly and thoughtful, but she was also firm and authoritative. Turns out, she could manage the fuck out of a project. And by working closely with Maya—who was extremely well respected in the Dreamer community and had a huge amount of insight into the kinds of tools they’d need—the Som became the most-used hub for Dreamers within weeks. Peter Petrawicki’s pathetic plan to wrangle secret sequence solutions was also constantly messed with from within the Som. Whenever people were bored, they just went into a private chat and churned out a fake sequence solution.

  By the end of March the Dream had taken over so much of our life that the Carls mostly dropped off our radar. But we rented office space across 23rd from Carl to keep an eye on him anyway. It was amazing how fast we spent money. We weren’t really in danger of running out, but it also didn’t take long to realize that “rich” is very relative. I maybe had $2 million in the bank at that point, and we burned through a full $300,000 of that in the first month of development. The money was officially going out faster than it was coming in, but everyone seemed confident that that would change as soon as the book came out, so that’s most of what I was focusing on.

  The good news was there was a solution to the money problems just on the horizon.

  April 24

  @AprilMaybeNot: When did “makin’ love” become “makin’ love” because they talk about makin’ love in lots of old songs and I don’t think they’re talking about fuckin’.

  My brother has gotten me and two hundred of his closest friends to fly back to Northern California so we can watch him get married. I wanted to drag everyone with me, but the development of the Som has become more than a full-time job. Only Robin came with, as it is his job to make my life easy. He is good at it.

  To tell you the truth, I resent this wedding. It’s beautiful, picturesque, even. They’ve rented out a venue in the woods surrounded by old-growth trees. Tom has made a lot of money at his job, so it doesn’t seem they spared much in the way of expenses. I’ve only hung out with his fiancée a couple of times, but she’s lovely and I’m honestly very happy for them, but I have work to do back in New York.

  I know that makes me sound like an ass, but I’ll remind you that there was a space alien and it had infiltrated our dreams. In fact, you probably don’t remember this, but this is the week when we found out a bit more about how the Dream worked and everyone freaked out.

  I was one of the bridesmaids, so I had to be there for the rehearsal, and of course there was a rehearsal dinner and there were toasts and it was really touching but took a really long time. Halfway through the rehearsal, the news broke. The US government had found some people who hadn’t been exposed to the Dream yet and begun to study them under quarantine. They had determined that the Dream did indeed pass from person to person exactly as if it were an airborne disease. More than that, the infection (they tried to not let this word be the word everyone used, but it was the one that fit best) was being spread by a physical thing. It could be filtered out. And the thing made measurable changes to people’s brains; fMRI scans of people with and without the “infection” were distinctly different.

  I was trying to be a good sister, so I didn’t look at my phone for like three straight hours, and when I picked it up, all hell had broken loose. I went to the bathroom and stayed there for a full half hour during the rehearsal dinner trying to catch up.

  Robin texted me, I assume you’ve heard about this “infection” nonsense. Otherwise, do you need me to get you some laxative?

  I feel like I need to do something. People are looking to me to say something but I don’t know how to frame it, I texted, still in the stall.

  There were tons of tweets from Defenders like,

  @BadApple24: It seems that @AprilMaybeNot is suddenly, very loudly silent. Nothing to say about this news, eh girly?

  And Peter Petrawicki himself tweeted:

  @PeterPetrawicki: Don’t expect folks like aprilmaybenot to talk at all today, they don’t want to engage with the reality that scientific study has concluded definitively that we have been infected with a mind-altering contagion.

  This was a thing they did to draw you into the conversation they wanted to have. Which is not to say it didn’t work. There was so much frustration and fear already that people were forcing themselves to stay awake so they could avoid the Dream, some taking amphetamines. But you can’t not sleep. A couple of people had died . . . They had died of the fear that Peter Petrawicki was peddling.

  Robin: April, your family is out here and they know what you’re doing.

  Frustrated, I pocketed my phone and made my way out.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Robin when I got out into the room. “You’re right. Is there any way you could prep a couple of talking points on this for me for later?”

  “Of course.”

  “You look fantastic in that suit, by the way.”

  “Thanks, it was not cheap.”

  “I’m not going to be able to stop thinking about this. It’s such bad optics. Everyone is saying ‘infection.’ Maybe if I had been there a few hours ago, I could have molded that language a bit, maybe called it something more technical.”

  “April, your brother needs you.”

  “I know, thank you, Robin. You’re a good friend.” He blushed a bit. Then I went back to pretending I wasn’t completely distracted and attended my brother’s wedding with 25 percent of my mind, max.

  May 19

  @AprilMaybeNot: “My Life with Carl: A Memoir and Manifesto” is in stores now! But who are we kidding, you’re ordering it on Amazon just like me because we care more about saving two dollars than the continued prosperity of our country! http://amzn.to/2ElGwTL

  I am standing in a Barnes & Noble; my book is on the shelf. The cover looks abstract, but it’s actually a close-up shot of Carl’s shoulder. The publisher wanted my face on the cover, they said it would sell more books, but I couldn’t imagine having my face staring out from every airport bookstore in the world. I picked it up and opened it to a random page and read words I wrote that were now sitting on the shelf of a bookstore.

  It seems likely that the iodine was necessary for the creation of the Dream. Harvard biochemist Alan Reichert writes that iodine, of the chemicals asked for, “is the only one commonly used in biochemical processes.” It’s a necessary compound for the creation of multiple thyroid hormones. While we still do not understand the mechanism of the Dream’s spread, when I touched the iodine to Carl’s hand, a wave of dizziness came over me. Soon after, everyone who had been exposed to me was also a carrier for the Dream. However the Dream is carried, it must have required raw materials that Carl had available, in either in the air or in the concrete as well as iodine.

  Did you spot it? A friend of mine once told me that, no matter how
much you proofread, the first time you open the final version of your book, you will find a typo on the very first page you look at. Ugh.

  But I’d done it. I wrote a book. There it was. Hardcover, tens of thousands of words, and I wrote them all. Sylvia, of course, gave me a lot of nudges, but ultimately, it was a thing I made. It felt very different from any of the other art I had done. So much of me was in it, and now here I was on the shelf. People were going to read it and, I hoped, maybe some minds would be changed. Ultimately, almost everyone who read that book was already on my side, and the only thing it served to do was make people like me angrier.

  June 1

  @AprilMaybeNot: I’ve only been on tour for like a week, but I already feel like maybe I’ve lived my entire life on this bus and everything else was an illusion.

  I’m on a stage in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in front of two thousand people. They’ve all bought tickets to see me read from my book and then to have me, Andy, and Miranda answer questions after the show is over. The space is not a traditional auditorium; it’s just a big carpeted box in a hotel that someone set up a couple thousand chairs in. The event sold out in less than a day. Every person had to buy a book—even if they already had one.

  The tour has actually been a blast. The three of us and Robin (and occasionally others—Andy’s dad, Jennifer Putnam, Sylvia Stone, publicists, marketers, etc.) are on a tour bus with bunks and a Nintendo and a shower and a refrigerator. It’s close quarters, and occasionally we grate on each other, but mostly it’s goofy, silly fun. Miranda and Andy actually have been spending a bunch of time together, which has given me time to write and hang out on the Som and yell at Defenders on Twitter.

  We’ve been answering questions for about twenty minutes. Most of them are about the Dream or about what I think about the cult in New Mexico that will shoot at anyone who approaches for fear of contracting the Dream or this or that crackpot theory about the Carls. We have a deal: I handle crackpot theories, Andy handles people who make “jokes” about me and Miranda being cute, and Miranda handles anything technical. Miranda often resents the time we have taken away from her work on the Som, but she agreed to come as long as there was really good Wi-Fi on the bus. Throughout the entire tour I have wished that Maya was there with us to handle questions about the Dream.

  Like this one:

  “What’s the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to you in the Dream?” This was asked by a twelve-year-old-girl.

  “Well, of course, it is all very strange,” I said, stalling, “but it’s such a silent and still place, the plane always catches me off guard.”

  “The what?” Miranda asked from the chair next to me.

  “The plane. When you get to the edge of the city, it comes in to land somewhere. I’ve never found where it lands.”

  There was a shuffling in the room.

  “Have you never been to the edge of the city?” I asked.

  “No, I’ve been,” Miranda said, “but there’s no plane. Nothing in the city moves. Ever.”

  “Raise your hand”—Andy took charge—“if you’ve ever seen a plane flying in the Dream.”

  No hands went up.

  “Oh,” I said.

  There was a fairly long silence and then I said, “Well, I guess that really is the weirdest thing that’s happened to me in the Dream then!” There was some laughter and we moved on to the next question.

  It was a guy in his thirties. He was wearing a sport coat and had neat, well-styled dark hair. His voice shook a little as he asked his question.

  “Yes, this question is for April. How does it feel to be a traitor to your species?” Now there was some loud grumbling in the audience, and the guy spoke louder into the microphone because he was worried we couldn’t hear him over other, nonamplified people talking. “How does it feel to know all the things you know and to go on pretending that there is no threat here? How does it feel to sell your planet and your country short for a few dollars”—here he held up my book—“and some notoriety?” His voice was trembling a bit and he sounded nervous. A few of his friends (whether they actually knew him or were just sympathetic Defenders who had come to cause a ruckus) whooped and shouted “Yeah” back in the audience.

  “Look, we disagree.” This kind of confrontation had happened before, and I’d gotten OK at dealing with it. “I am willing to accept that you have the best interests of the planet at heart, and it hurts me that you cannot accept the same thing about me. I have no evidence indicating that the Carls want anything other than to bring humanity close—”

  “FUCK YOU, TRAITOR BITCH!” someone, not the guy at the mic, shouted from the back.

  Suddenly the entire auditorium was involved. I looked to Andy and Miranda, who seemed startled and scared. People were standing up to look for the guy who had shouted. Things were officially out of hand. I was shouting into the mic, but no one could hear me—either that or they weren’t paying attention. People were in the aisles now. I looked up from my chair and saw Andy in front of me. He grabbed my hand and pulled me up. I didn’t want to leave the stage. If we couldn’t calm the room down, this would be all over the news tomorrow: APRIL MAY BOOK TOUR CANCELED BY PROTESTERS or some such. Things were not calming down in the room, though. Andy and Miranda physically removed me from the stage.

  June 6

  @AprilMaybeNot: You’d think that if space aliens built me from scratch to help them conquer a planet I would be coordinated enough not to close my boob in a door. And yet . . .

  I’m back at my apartment on 23rd sitting in front of my computer. I know what I have to do, but I can’t do it.

  The book tour was canceled after the Ann Arbor debacle. Since they’ve existed, the Defenders have been harassing me online. Their conspiracy theories just kept piling up on each other until I was literally nonhuman. Maybe I was the anti-Christ, maybe I was a demon, maybe I was an alien. Dehumanization is usually a metaphor, but for a certain segment of folks, it had become reality. I was not human.

  I’m going to be honest with you: It was horrifying. That moment in the hotel, when things got out of control, that was scary. But worse was diving down the rabbit hole of people’s delusions and knowing that I was at the center of it, knowing that there were thousands of people in the world who would be happier if I died—they told me so all the time. I was constantly anxious, which in turn made me moody and distractible, and led to me catastrophizing. Publicly, I played it cooler than James Dean.

  My address wasn’t a secret. The NYPD had been called a dozen times by people claiming to be held hostage in my apartment, an online harassment strategy called “swatting.” The hope was that the police would take the threat seriously and send the SWAT team to literally bust down my door. Lucky for me, Robin had, in his first week, called the NYPD to add me to a list of potential targets so I would never actually meet the SWAT team face-to-face. I did, of course, watch videos of it happening to people. It often happens to people who are livestreaming gameplay. It’s terrifying. The door crashes down, everyone is yelling, these huge guys in body armor point assault rifles at everyone. One plus of the Dream was that if I stayed in it all night and didn’t wake up, I’d stay out of my nightmares.

  There were ten thousand moments in a hundred days when I wanted to hang it all up and hide. The Som had become mostly self-sustaining when Miranda added a premium subscription tier that cost five dollars per month. My Life with Carl had sold more than a million copies, and I made a ludicrous seven dollars for every one that sold, so, like, you do the math. I could retire now, and it would have been safer and nicer if I had. The only things that kept me in the game were:

  I hated Peter Petrawicki and the Defenders, and I was going to do everything in my power to defeat their message with the truth, which I believed we were close to figuring out.

  Giving up because people were harassing me would have been letting them win.

 
I was really, deeply, honestly, and truly infatuated with having people pay attention to me.

  I did promise you honesty.

  I’ve gotten off topic. I was sitting at my computer in the second bedroom in my apartment. No one was there. It was 8:03 P.M. I had, earlier that day, texted Maya to ask if we could Skype. She said sure, 8 P.M. would work for her. I had now been just sitting there with my mouse hovering over the button for three minutes.

  Of course, she just went ahead and called me. I answered.

  “Hey,” I said, trying to sound normal.

  “Hi, April. How are you?” It was so good to see her.

  “I don’t know, honestly it’s very hard to check in with myself these days,” I answered, way too truthfully.

  She nodded with a mix of concern and frustration. “Yeah, that’s . . . Yeah, that’s not surprising. I’m really sorry about what happened in Ann Arbor, that sounds terrible.”

  “I’m getting used to it,” I lied. The only thing I was getting used to was pretending like I was getting used to it. Since I knew Maya knew I was lying, and she knew I knew she knew, we just gave it a pass.

  “Look,” I continued, “something else weird happened in Ann Arbor and it’s stuck with me. You know more than anyone else about the Dream, so I wanted to run it by you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Every time I walk out of the city and into the grass, I can hear and see an airplane landing somewhere nearby. I can only track it until it goes below the buildings, but it’s definitely landing. I mentioned that and everyone in the audience seemed to think I was making stuff up.”

  Maya sat there still as a stone, head crooked very, very slightly to the side, lips open, eyebrows just a little bit furrowed. There was something in her face that made me think that maybe she felt just a tiny bit like throwing up.