An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

by Hank Green

  “Maya?”

  “Nothing in the Dream moves unless you move it,” she said.

  “The receptionist moves,” I said.

  “Yes, OK, aside from that.” She brushed it aside. “This is a well-known thing. There’s fabric in the Dream . . . flags hanging on flagpoles, but the wind never stirs them. There are plants, but they never get bigger or lose their blossoms. This is a well-accepted and known thing. Nothing moves in the Dream.”

  “Well, it’s happened to me every time I’ve been to the edge of the city. The airplane comes in and lands somewhere.”

  Maya groaned a long, low, quiet groan. She leaned her head forward and her locs fell over her face.

  “Did I do something wrong?” I asked. Not defensive, but concerned. I was getting a feeling from Maya that I screwed something up.

  “April.” Maya looked up at the camera, and then her face flickered through like twenty different emotions. Frustration, fright, excitement, back to frustration, curiosity, excitement again, and then yet more frustration.

  “Maya,” I said, after it seemed like she needed to be snapped out of it.

  She threw her arms up in frustration and then literally facepalmed.

  “OH MY GOD WHAT?!” I was actually a little scared, like I had some kind of dream cancer or something.

  “Nothing moves in the Dream, April. But weirder than that, worse than that, nothing is different for anyone in the Dream. The receptionist moves, and the receptionist speaks the native tongue of the dreamer, but other than that, everything is exactly the same. EXACTLY. People have counted the number of blades of grass in a house’s front lawn. It’s exactly the same for every person. Every person on earth.

  “So when you say something happens in your dream that doesn’t happen in anyone else’s, it is a mixture of extremely exciting and extremely frustrating. Exciting, because you and I are going to work on this mystery, which may very well be the last puzzle the Dream has to offer, as we’re quickly reaching 4,096. And frustrating because, good lord god almighty, I know that you are a good person, but the last thing you need is some other sign from heaven that you are special.” She sighed.

  That pissed me off a little. I put on a stern face and said, “Maya, I didn’t ask for any of this.”

  Maya took a long moment to think before she said, “Is it OK with you if I retract my previous statement and we keep this conversation to business?”

  “That might be a good call.” I was annoyed that she was avoiding the fight, but I also didn’t want to fight. “I’m just going to be someone with an unusual Dream problem, and you are the expert who needs to help me. Let’s role-play!” I immediately regretted that joke. But Maya, courteously, laughed.

  “OK, it frustrates me to no end that I cannot be in your brain to figure this out, but here’s what you are going to do. The moment you spawn, you are going to make a beeline for the edge of the city. The fastest way to get there is probably to run straight down Broadway—that’s the street that you exit the tower onto. The moment you see the plane, you’re going to run—DO NOT WALK—toward it. If you see the plane, or if you’re able to get on board, here’s what you look for.

  “First, anything unusual. You need to spend the next few hours and maybe the next few days learning everything you can about airplanes. Try to figure out what kind this is in your first go. Is it a Boeing? An Airbus? A CRJ? You can start broad and narrow it down doing research between sleeps. You might just have a sensation that something is a little off. Dream clues are often omissions, things that aren’t there that should be, but you might not be able to spot them if you don’t know what the plane’s cockpit is supposed to look like.

  “Second, any broken repetition. Usually repeating units in the Dream are identical, so anything that makes one thing different from others of the same type is probably important. If one of the seats isn’t in its full, upright, and locked position, or one of the windows is single-paned, or one of the bathrooms smells weird. It could be anything.

  “Third, don’t try to do this on your own. Talk to me. I’ll get together a few people I trust who might have relevant knowledge. I know that it can be really appealing to you to win independently, but there haven’t been any puzzle sequences solved by a lone Dreamer for over a month now. These things are complicated, and it’s clear to me that the Carls want us to be working together. Find what you can find and report back to me. I know what I’m doing.”

  I had been taking notes. I tabbed over back to Skype. “Any other sage wisdom, O Guru of the Dream?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Don’t mock me or I will leave you alone with this mystery and your failure to solve it will eat you alive.”

  “Right!” I said.

  That entire conversation had the feeling of a pleasant stroll inches away from the edge of the Grand Canyon. It was really quite nice, wonderful, even. But it was impossible to forget that I was one stumble away from some serious unpleasantness.

  “I will report back in the morning,” I said.

  “If you’re lying to me about any of this, I will set fire to your apartment building,” she said.

  It was not particularly easy to fall asleep that night. Anticipation always negates grogginess, even if you’ve become the kind of person who is perpetually groggy like I had. But I kept reading a biography of Rodin that I’d been working my way through for the fourth time until I finally found myself in the lobby. I did just what Maya told me to, and soon I was running toward a plane that was headed for a landing somewhere in the city. After having done some preliminary research on airplanes, I could tell that this was a big plane but not a huge one. It didn’t have two stories like a 747 or an A380, which meant it was, like, one of twenty-five different types of planes that all looked practically identical.

  As I ran toward where I thought the plane was landing, I noticed that I wasn’t getting tired, I could run at full speed for as long as I wanted to. I guess that’s not weird for dreams, but being in control and aware the way I was in the Dream made it a thrill. So I let my feet carry me as fast as they could, which was about as fast as I could go in real life. Which is to say, not particularly fast.

  After I lost sight of the plane, I had to make an educated guess at where it landed. It would keep moving after it touched down—planes did that—so I headed off roughly to where I thought it might end up.

  I failed. I got lost, wandered the city for forty-five minutes, had a thought, and then slammed my head hard against a tree. On purpose, of course. There were a number of ways to wake up from the Dream, but the easiest was to try to hurt yourself. It never actually hurt and you found yourself lying in your bed.

  Getting back into the Dream required that you spend some time awake. If you just went straight back to sleep, you’d have normal dreams all night.

  So I groggily checked Twitter, read a couple of top posts on the Som, and then, judging it to have been long enough, went back to sleep.

  This time, I headed toward the edge and then walked around a bit until I found what I was looking for: a building that was taller than most. It was maybe seven stories high, some dope Japanese pagoda. It was only a few blocks from the edge of the city, and it was higher than the vast majority of buildings around it. I scouted it and found that the stairs indeed led all the way to the top story.

  So I went all the way to the edge of the city, saw the plane, and then ran like mad to the pagoda and up to the top floor. I still couldn’t see where the plane was ending up, but I got a much better idea of some nearby landmarks. It dropped below the skyline in front of the main skyscraper, so it was in my part of town. An experienced Dreamer would have been able to walk straight there, but the city’s winding, angled, narrow streets still baffled me.

  But I got there.

  To this day I don’t know how it’s supposed to have landed, but the plane was there, nestled into a little park that now lo
oked to clearly have been made for a plane to fit into it. Apparently, it didn’t need a runway. I mean, obviously these things don’t have to make sense. That was emphasized as I approached the plane and something felt really off about it. Maya said that that might happen, something might be missing, except that this wasn’t subtle. The plane’s landing gear wasn’t down. It was floating, its belly six or seven feet off the ground, the engines just a couple of feet. I could walk right up to them and touch them. Overcoming some seriously irrational fear, I put my hand into the jet engine and spun the giant fan inside.

  It was painted to look like it was owned by an airline, but I didn’t recognize the logo. It was a gray horizontal bar with a lighter gray circle overlapping it. Like a sun rising behind an ocean, except the circle was in front of the horizon. The image’s intense simplicity made it look more like a country’s flag than a corporate logo.

  The fuselage was wrapped entirely in a honeycomb pattern with randomly placed red hexagons among the white ones.

  I finished walking around the plane and could find nothing else of interest. It was way too big to even think of trying to get up to the door. I could reach up over my head and brush the underbelly of the plane while I walked under it, but the only places I thought might be a hatch I could open wouldn’t open. There was no landing gear to climb up, so I tried to climb up the engine. I started on the front, but that definitely wasn’t going to happen. The engine was twice as tall as me and there was nothing to hold on to.

  I went around the back and started trying to climb. I’m not super in shape, but at least I’m light. I wedged myself between the engine’s outer and inner levels and tried to shove myself up. I managed to wiggle my way up to the point that the engine was curving back toward the plane and was almost on top. Now I just had to get my hands spun around so I could get a grip on the engine’s outer casing.

  As I tried to do this, my butt slipped, and suddenly I was toppling a full fifteen feet, out of control and panicking. I woke up before I hit the ground.

  The next day, when I debriefed Maya, she had a couple of suggestions for me, the biggest of which was that I wasn’t going to solve this whole thing on my own and that I really needed to stop pretending that I was the only hero of this story. Her argument was that it wasn’t just slowing us down; it was dangerous. The more I made it look like I was the center of this story, the more people who hated me would hate me.

  My argument in reply was that those people were unstable douchebags, so we shouldn’t listen to them. Maya’s argument was that they were cray . . . so we should.

  July 8

  @AprilMaybeNot: Today I met a literal billionaire and he gave me a prompt and thorough critique of the way I introduced myself to him, so . . . fuck that guy.

  I just went to the fanciest party of my life. Miranda, Andy, Maya, and I had been interviewed in this documentary film a very famous guy made, and we got invited to the premiere. We got to buy extremely expensive clothes that made us feel (if not look) like movie stars. And then we walked down a literal red carpet while hundreds of professional photographers took pictures of us.

  By luck, the movie premiere also fell on the day when the 4,096th (and, as far as we could tell, final) sequence in the Dream was solved, though we didn’t know that at that point.

  We watched the movie in a historic theater and then went to a bar that the movie people had rented out. It was dark and all the lights were red-tinted and the bar was giving away free Carl-themed cocktails.

  Of course, as with any party like this, the invite list was narrow but deep. Lots of people who weren’t involved in the movie but were nonetheless A-list celebrities had decided to come because it was a social event.

  They all wanted to talk to me.

  And that was great, except I really had to pee and there was a line for the bathroom that was about forty people long. You’d think they would have planned for this . . .

  Robin and the rest of the gang had all set up shop at a booth, being significantly less in-demand for selfies than me. Miranda was wearing a dark green cotton affair. It was half knitted, half flat. The sleeves hugged her arms tightly all the way down to her wrists and the dress flared out above her waist and ended just above her knees.

  Cute. Cute. Cute.

  But Miranda’s cute isn’t my kind of cute, I reminded myself.

  Anyway, I started to walk toward them before getting swept back into the glory and adoration, and the filmmaker introduced me to a literal billionaire.

  The majority of my interactions that night were cool people telling me they thought I was cool, while I had three drinks, which put me very near to out-of-my-comfort-zone drunk, but not quite. There were a couple of other people at the party who mostly created for the internet—I could actually have conversations with them, and I did. The traditional Hollywood people just had absolutely nothing in common with me.

  So, basically, it was extremely fun, but then time passed and eventually I was in my hotel room and it was over and I didn’t know what to do. I was still drunk. I didn’t want to go to sleep. The only thing that was waiting for me there was an unsolvable mystery plane that I’d been working on for almost a month. I’d explored every inch of the exterior of that plane. Maya’s efforts to help within my limitations had been fruitless, but I wouldn’t let her spread it any further than that. I didn’t want to watch hotel TV. I tweeted about the party a bit, but it didn’t give me anything. It all seemed deeply, deeply normal and that wasn’t supposed to be me anymore.

  My feel-good brain goodies had been going all night and now it was over. You’d think I’d peacefully cuddle into my fancy hotel bed and drop off to a delicious sleep, but no. This is what rock stars feel like after their concerts . . . This is why they have after-parties with groupies and cocaine. You want to keep the high going, but you can’t rock forever, I guess.

  I picked up the phone and dialed the operator.

  “Can you connect me to Miranda Beckwith’s room?”

  “One moment please.”

  And then Miranda was on the phone.

  I was well aware that hooking up with Miranda would make my life more complicated. I wasn’t even that attracted to Miranda, but (and I realize I was coming at this from a position of extreme privilege) I was terrified of the aching loneliness of this cold hotel bed.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, it’s April, are you still up?”

  “Yeah, I mean, why didn’t you just text me?”

  “I thought this was more fun, I had the operator connect us!”

  “Oooooo,” she mimicked my faux enthusiasm.

  “So, I know you’ve been doing some research on what I’ve told you about the 767 Sequence.” I’d shared this with Maya, Andy, Robin, and Miranda and sworn them all to secrecy. I figured Miranda would have some ideas by now. “I thought maybe you could come by my room and we could go over it before I go to sleep.”

  “Yeah! I’ve got a couple ideas!” She sounded absolutely oblivious to the fact that there might be an alternate interest in my asking her over, which worried me. She was obviously a little obsessed with me, but maybe that didn’t go beyond “April May, Discoverer of New York Carl.” Maybe I’d misread her. Maybe she was super straight or just not attracted to me!

  This was the kind of fear-based excitement I was looking for.

  “Cool, 606,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s funny,” she replied.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, I’ll tell you when I get there.”

  I went to the bathroom and brushed my teeth. I had taken off my fancy dress, of course, but I freshened up my makeup just enough that hopefully she wouldn’t notice I’d done it. Then I put on a tank top that was a little too small and sleeping pants that were a little too big. I looked at myself in the mirror and thought, I’d do me, and then she knocked. I swear I caught her checking me out for just a m
illisecond before her eyes hit mine.

  She looked adorable as always in a gray T-shirt fabric skater dress. The waist of the dress was high, almost an empire waist. It was tight across her slight bust and then flowed out to only hint at the shape below.

  This was the evening I needed.

  We sat down next to each other on the bed and chatted a bit about the adventures of the evening before settling into Dream interpretation. “The hexagons? I have no idea, that could be encoding anything. It could be binary, it could be some numerical pattern, I don’t know, April, I’ve worked through it a dozen ways and nothing makes any sense. But I do have a couple leads on the airline logo thing.” Since the hotel room didn’t have much in the way of chairs, we sat together on the end of the bed, our laptops in our laps.

  “It felt familiar to me in the Dream,” I said, “but nothing we’ve gone through has turned anything up.”

  “Well”—she lifted her laptop and leaned it gently on my upper thigh—“it probably looks familiar because it has the vague look of a flag. If you filled in the top, it would be a rectangle with a circle in it with bars of color. That’s, like, flag design 101. But not only is this definitely not a flag of an existing country, it just seems more likely that it’s representing something else.”

  “Why?” I tried to make as much eye contact with her huge brown eyes as I could.

  “I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem like the Dream to be referring to a specific country so blatantly. Usually it’s more abstract than that.”

  She seemed both excited and nervous.

  “I think it’s more likely that it’s either symbolic or representative. The symbolic feel is like the sun in front of the ocean, which might mean something to someone, but it doesn’t mean anything to me. But I’ve been thinking about it being representative. What if it’s not a single symbol, but two? It could be one dot and one dash of Morse code. If it’s just a dot and a dash, that would be just the letter A. But if it’s broken into two letters, that’s”—she checked her computer—“E . . . and T.”