by Hank Green
“OK,” I replied, in a croak.
“OK, I need you to do that now. The smoke is your biggest enemy.”
“OK, I’m going to jump out of a window now,” I said, suddenly aware that those might be my last words.
“OK,” the man replied.
So I stuffed both phones in my jeans pocket. I grabbed the desk drawer and slammed it into the window. Smoke started pouring into the room. My next breath was excruciating. It didn’t feel like it contained anything except tiny needles, and the coughing fit that ensued made me involuntarily gasp in more smoke. I coughed more. I realized I wasn’t getting any real air.
I thought I would have time to clean off the glass, but I didn’t. I took my shirt off my face and placed it over the glass nubs sticking up from the window frame—some protection, at least. I plopped my right ass cheek onto the shirt and nonetheless felt the glass biting through the shirt, my jeans, and my skin.
But I was retching now. I rushed to get my body positioned to lower myself from my hands—to save those precious five feet between me and the ground—but then I just fell. Ungainly, and listing to one side, I fell into open air. I felt the sudden heat of the fire—the little room had been protecting me—but in those milliseconds before I slammed into the ground, I could see the smoke begin to clear.
I hit, left foot first, then left arm, then my head slammed against the concrete. Somehow, this wasn’t enough to knock me unconscious. I continued to cough, my lungs still filled with the evil particles of smoke. But now when I gasped, it didn’t get worse. My brain could tell that I wasn’t suffocating anymore, and so it moved to the more pressing issue of the screaming pain coming from my arm and leg.
The smoke was so clear down here that I could see the fire . . . It was licking every vertical surface in eyeshot. Several sensations screamed simultaneously through the fog of my concussion, but my leg was the loudest. I raised myself on my good right arm, getting myself into a rough sitting position. I looked down. The lower part—above the ankle—was very broken. Blood was already starting to soak through my pants.
“This Is God Damn Bull Shit!” I shouted.
I realized that everyone, seeing only the darkness of my pocket on the livestream, heard me say those words. Even now, I was still thinking about the audience.
I reached into my pants pocket, pulling out both phones. “OK, I’m OK—I mean, not OK. I’m badly injured, but I’m not dead yet. Let’s hold on to the fact that I’m not dead yet.” I could feel the heat beating on me from every direction, but more from the top and the right than from the left. So I started to move myself in that direction. There was a loud and persistent roaring filling the warehouse.
And then I had the dumbest thought that I’d ever had in my life. “Everywhere around the world! Guys. Not just one Carl at a time. Every Carl. At the same time.”
Very me of me to assume that no one else had figured this out yet. But I had something no one else had, an audience. Bigger than the Super Bowl. Bigger than Neil Freaking Armstrong.
The stream view count read more than seven hundred million viewers. What can’t you do with an audience that big? Well, sometimes . . . nothing.
I could hear the policeman shouting my name from my other phone. I picked it up and coughed a half dozen times before saying, “I broke my leg, but the air is much better down here.”
“Can you move?”
“Not easily,” I half yelled over the noise of the fire.
“Just move toward the back wall. There is less fire there.”
“My new favorite kind of fire,” I said, and the cop actually laughed.
At that moment, a call came in from Miranda. OK. That had to be important. “I’m getting another call, be right back,” I said to the emergency response professional who was trying to save my life.
“Things are not good here,” I said.
“I know, April, I’m watching. Maya is here.”
“I know what we need to do. We need every Carl to be touched with gold simultaneously. Like with the iodine, but every Carl at the same time. In fact, I don’t know why I’m telling you, I should be telling them.”
I picked up the livestream phone. “Hello, I don’t know if this will help me. Maybe it will, or maybe it’s just the best chance we have of getting this last step done, but if you are near a Carl, or know someone who is, could you touch that Carl with a piece of gold? Just some jewelry will do, we think. I’d really like to know how this ends before . . . well, you know.”
I picked up the phone Maya was on again and said, “OK, well, that’s something at least.”
“You’re actually one step ahead of us for once,” Maya said.
I laughed, then coughed.
“Miranda decoded the actual code with your passkey. It’s just the atomic symbol for gold sixty-four times.”
“Well, Carl clearly wanted to get his point across, I guess.”
“April, there are a lot of places where the Carls aren’t publicly accessible. There are fifteen Carls in China, and they’ve been under military guard for months. You can’t just walk up to one and put a piece of gold on it.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that. Carl had sent us our instructions, but we were too damned stupid to allow ourselves to comply. Maybe in a few years, after treaties were signed, everyone would get on board and try it out, but probably not. Probably the Carls would just sit there forever, waiting for the Earth to get its shit together enough to do this one stupid, simple little thing.
I turned back to the livestream, moving in close to the mic so they could hear me over the roar of the fire. “Hello again, look, I’m not going to say this is hopeless. But there are sixty-four Carls in the world and a good 20 percent of them are under military guard. If the goal is to touch all of them with gold simultaneously, I honestly think we are being tested. The Carls want us to work together, they want us to be human together, to take a risk together, to make a choice together.”
I took a break to cough.
“I’m stuck in a burning building. But more than that, I’m stuck on this planet with you. And honestly, I’m glad. I’ve been exposed to a lot of awful people in the last few months, but I’ve met so many more that are amazing, thoughtful, generous, and kind. I honestly believe that is the human condition. And if the Carls are testing us, this final test is the hardest to accomplish. If you pay attention, there is only one story that makes sense, and that is one in which humanity works together more and more since we took over this planet. Yeah, we fuck it up all the time, yeah, there have been some massive steps backward, but look at us! We are one species now more than we have ever been. People fight against that, and they probably always will, but could there be any time in history when what Carl is asking us would be more possible? Asking dozens of governments to take the same action simultaneously with an uncertain outcome? Or at least asking them to allow their citizens to take that action?”
More coughing.
“I don’t know. I think maybe if we can’t do it right now, with eight hundred million people watching, we won’t ever be able to do it. So let’s try to do something together. Thank you. Thank you for doing this together.”
And then, I did something no sane creator would ever do. At the peak of my audience, I ended the stream.
Then I picked up Miranda’s call again, yelling, “I think that will help.”
Maya said something into the phone then, but I couldn’t hear over the noise the fire was making. It was starting to feel hard to breathe. I was gasping even though the smoke wasn’t so bad. The heat, I thought, or maybe shock. In fact, though I didn’t know it then, the fire was consuming all the oxygen in the building.
It was so hot. So blazing hot, but there was no escape. It felt like it was coming equally from every direction simultaneously. And since trying to move with a compound fracture was no fun, I just sat still.
“Is Andy there?” I shouted, suddenly wanting to talk to him.
“No, he’s currently holding one of my earrings against New York Carl,” Miranda said.
“You guys. I’m sorry. I’m going to leave it at that.”
And then I hung up to call Andy.
“Are you OK?” he answered.
“No, is anything happening yet?”
“No, April . . .”
“I know, Andy. There’s nothing you could have done. I know that you’re going to be mad at me forever, and that’s OK, but don’t be mad at yourself forever. You were right, and no one could have stopped me.”
“Don’t fucking give up, April.” His voice was shaking.
“I’m not going to,” I gasped, and then Andy shouted in what sounded like shock or fright.
“Are you OK?” I said.
“It’s the hand . . .” And then there was a loud pop.
A fraction of a second later, from above me came a thundering crack. The roar of the fire had been a constant weight on my mind, but this dwarfed that noise. I looked up, still somehow thinking maybe . . . maybe now I would be saved. Through the veil of smoke above came a rushing tumult of fire and wood.
And this is the part you might really want to skip if you don’t want the gore because a burning wood beam, probably several thousand pounds, fell through the space that was also occupied by my head. It entered just above my hairline on the right side. It hit with so much force that it didn’t even knock me out of the way. It slid through me like a knife dropped into a glass of water.
The beam broke through my skull, taking a small hunk of brain.
Then it tore off the right side of my face.
It missed my torso by inches, and then slammed into my right leg just above the ankle. Those things hurt more than anything I had ever experienced. But then, as the flame expanded and the skin of my bare torso began to cook, I learned that it could get worse.
I remained conscious for a few terrible seconds after this, so I had a little bit of time to finally and without a doubt understand that I was going to die.
I understood it, but there was no acceptance in that understanding, only bitterness, terror, frustration, and hatred piled on top of the pain. I screamed and then it was all gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I was in the lobby where you arrive in the Dream. That slick, modern office building. Carpet tiles, familiar music, reception desk, all of it exactly the same. Except at the desk, instead of the sleek little robot, stood Carl. I’d gotten used to seeing him with just one hand, so the fact that he had two stood out. His helmeted head almost scraped the ceiling. He was menacing, maybe because my mind was expecting danger, maybe because I had just watched my body get ripped apart, maybe because Carl had torn my world open and I knew it could never be put back together again or because so many people had died on July 13 and I wasn’t one of them.
Maybe it was just because Carl was actually pretty scary-looking.
I looked down at myself, afraid of the burns and wounds I expected to see, but it was just me. I was wearing a silk blouse and a tight black skirt, like I was about to go to a nine-to-five at some corporate PR company.
“Carl?” I said.
“Your body is very badly damaged.” That tremendous suit of armor didn’t move, but the voice was clearly coming from it. It was a loud, clear tenor. If I had to guess gender, I would say male, but I’m glad I didn’t have to guess. The voice bounced around the hard walls of the office.
“So, then I’m not . . . dead?” I was surprised.
“Not this moment.”
That wasn’t super comforting. I wanted to follow the logical course of the conversation, to find out what had happened and what was going to happen now, but I also was talking to Carl, and I had been imagining this moment for so long that I just skipped ahead and blurted out, “Why did you come here?”
“Three questions.”
“What?”
“It is a tradition in your stories. Also, your body will likely not keep working for long without intervention.” That certainly raised a question, but I wasn’t taking the bait.
“Why did you come here?” I repeated.
“To observe.” I waited for more, because, I mean, that had been my guess all along and it was a bit unsatisfying.
“Can you elaborate on that? Or does that count as another question? Does that count as another question?” And then, since I am so good at First Contact scenarios, I concluded in a frustrated whisper, “. . . Crapballs.”
If Carl reacted to my mini freak-out, he did so internally.
“We had to see how you react to us. There was no way to know without contact. This is the beginning of a process.” And then, to save me from my fear that I’d used all my questions, he said, “You have two more questions.”
I wanted to ask very much what that process was. Had they been through this before? Were we dangerous? Were we being studied like ants? Like wild gorillas? Or like fungus?
But I had a more pressing debate happening in my mind. I wanted so badly to ask about myself, about why I had been singled out and saved so many times. But while epiphanies are temporary, I had learned this lesson too many times too recently. As much as this was about me, it was also about more than me.
“How do we measure up?” I asked, seriously, and with conviction.
“I don’t understand,” Carl said.
“You came to observe us, to test our reactions. Did we pass your tests?”
“I don’t understand,” Carl said again.
I struggled to rephrase the question. “Humanity, what do you think of us?”
“Beautiful,” Carl replied.
We sat inside of that moment for a very long time. I thought maybe he would say more, but he didn’t.
“I suppose that’s something.”
I figured any questions about where Carl was from or how he got here would be more or less useless without a lot of context and also probably advanced degrees in physics. So I caved and again, one final time, made it all about me.
“Did you choose me for this?” I asked.
And then I am at the 23rd Street subway station. My MetroCard is in my hand. The station is empty, it’s late—I know when this is. It’s the night I met Carl. I walk up to the turnstile and swipe the card. It flashes red. But I used this MetroCard dozens of times after this night. I’d never even thought about that. But my dream body turns and leaves the station even though my mind is already freaking out. The walk sign is on, so I cross 23rd. A taxi’s horn blares at me as if I shouldn’t be crossing the street. I look up. The taxi has a green light. I have the walk light, but the stoplight across 23rd is red. The walk light shouldn’t be on . . . If the stoplight is red . . .
I came back to the dream lobby. The truth slammed into me hard. Carl, or the Carls, or some related intelligence had stopped me from getting on that train. They had turned me around and sent me back, even going so far as to make sure I didn’t walk down the wrong side of 23rd.
“Since then? You . . . you chose me before I even made the first video?”
“We did.”
There was a long pause. I stared up at Carl, realizing I was crying with the weight of it. There are billions of people on this planet. Literally nothing made me special.
“Why?”
“Your story just started, April May,” Carl replied. And then the dream ended.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Hello, everyone. I’m Andy Skampt. April asked me to take over and finish, because, well, she wasn’t around during this part of the story. I don’t love doing this, but I understand why she wants me to do it, so here I am.
I’ve read this whole book and signed off on it. I think April has done a pretty great thing here. I think the book helped her, and I think it will help the rest of us too. Though,
to be honest, it seems like this kind of stuff is easier for her now.
Anyway, let’s take it from the point where I’m standing on 23rd, holding a golden earring onto New York Carl’s hip, talking to April and realizing rapidly that I am unnecessary because about fifty other people have rushed to the scene to add their jewelry. I step away to hear April a bit better. I am feeling a lot like I’m 100 percent responsible for what’s happening to her right now. Like, if I hadn’t walked out on her, she would not now be dying of smoke inhalation in a warehouse in Hoboken.
It is the worst feeling I’ve ever had, and April is telling me to stop having it. It’s emotional enough that I’m 100 percent uncomfortable relaying it to you.
So I’m walking away from Carl and the growing group of people around him, and April is talking to me. And then I hear a couple of people shouting exclamations of various sorts. I turn around, and I see Carl’s missing hand, as big as a trash-can lid, skipping down the street at full speed. I mean, I say full speed, but I don’t know how fast a full-speed hand is. It’s going fast.
People leap away from Carl as they see it. All of the dozen people who have gotten their hands in, holding their trinkets to his surface, scatter, shouting in alarm.
The hand weaves between the bodies, still moving at speed when it slams noiselessly into place right onto New York Carl’s right wrist. Everyone is either running away or just staring blankly. I realize that no one is holding any gold to his surface, so I run over with Miranda’s earring and push it as hard as I can into Carl’s belly.
Before I can even register that I’ve hit the surface of the robot, his right arm shoots up and the hand makes a fist like he’s grabbing onto a point in space above his head. This took a long time for my brain to understand, and it helped that there was plenty of footage of it happening released later. But once my brain latched onto it, it’s clear what happens: Carl grabs onto a point in the universe, and then yanks himself into the air. Fast. Fast enough that a vacuum is left behind and I’m sucked into (and through) the space where Carl was just standing. A massive CRACK sounds, and I fly into a bank of pay phones shoulder first. I’m later told that the crack I heard was a sonic boom. Carl left at faster than the speed of sound.