A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

by Hank Green

  “No, but I wouldn’t say anything if they did.”

  “Have you ever seen a book like this?” I asked, right before realizing the book had specifically told me not to tell anyone about the book. Did this count?

  She regarded the book skeptically, and then carefully said, “It looks like a book to me, can I take a closer look?”

  “No,” I stammered. “I mean, if it doesn’t look familiar, it doesn’t look familiar. That’s OK. Thanks a lot.”

  * * *

  —

  The walk to Tompkins Square Park was pretty long. My sub was sure to get cold along the way, but I was just happy to be outside.

  Life was different now, but New York was still New York. No switch had been flipped when aliens came to visit us. It still looked and sounded and smelled the same. Think pieces were happily guessing about the generation of kids who would be raised in a post-Carl world and how their perspectives on everything from employment to brand-name toothpaste would be different. And who knows, maybe they would be, but New York would still be there for them to project their dreams onto.

  I thought about how maybe the constancy of our surroundings makes us believe in a constancy of reality and of self.

  I made a mental note that maybe that would be a good topic for a video, or at least an Instagram caption.

  When I got to the park, I did what pretty much everyone else was doing: I watched the people. The East Village is still a little weird, even after all these decades of gentrification. So while the nannies outnumber the weirdos, it still makes for good people watching. I wiped the sweet onion sauce off my hand and crumpled up the wrapper, walking over to a trash can. And as I was about to stuff it in and then check my email, I saw the corner of a thin brown clothbound book sticking out of the trash.

  I pulled it out.

  “The Book of Good Times: Part 2,” its cover proclaimed.

  8.6K upvotes—reddit.com/r/pics—posted by u/cantdecideaname

  “I Went to See the Place Where New York Carl Was and Found Andy Skampt”

  MIRANDA

  How anyone decides what to put in a book is a mystery to me.

  You don’t leave out details in scientific writing, as that’s a fantastic way to get your paper rejected. You need to explain exactly what happened in precise language with as little subjectivity as possible. That’s how I’m used to communicating, but I’ve been consistently if subtly informed that that will not do in this situation, and I know how important it is to trust expertise. I’m just supposed to decide what is interesting and/or important, which mostly means that every word I write makes me more and more anxious. This should be fun.

  Luckily, Maya and Andy have gone first, so I’ll start where Andy left off, which is roughly when I sent a text into our group text with Maya, Robin, and (yes, still) April. It just felt wrong to start a new one without her.

  Miranda: Andy’s on the front page of Reddit right now.

  Andy: God fucking damn it, what did I do?

  Miranda: You went to the Carl plaque . . . you looked sad. Someone took a picture.

  The photo was of Andy looking sad and pensive, surrounded by the activity of the city. It was a good picture.

  Andy: Jesus, I was going to fucking Subway and stopped for like five seconds.

  Robin: No one is being mean about it, it just looks sad.

  Maya: Well, it is sad.

  I was definitely not going to be the one to respond after Maya’s text. One, I will never stop feeling weird about hooking up with April. Two, Maya had handled April’s disappearance differently from the rest of us. I went back to Berkeley to distract myself by finishing my PhD. Andy was a professional famous person, and Robin was managing him. We were doing our lives again; Maya was not. She hadn’t given up on somehow finding April, and while she didn’t actively try to make us feel guilty, her disappointment was clear.

  Andy: That was the first time I’ve gone there. I think I’ve been avoiding it this whole time. I also told that guy off and he still posted the photo. Good lord.

  Maya: Well, I guess you’re the new sad Keanu . . . there are worse fates.

  Robin: We all must aspire to our inner Keanuness.

  This is going to sound stupid, but I still felt like a bit of a fake hanging around with these people. I don’t know if this was a me problem or a signal I was actually getting from them, but I felt like an honorary member of the crew rather than a real one. I just wasn’t as cool as any of them were.

  Maya: Have you guys read the profile of PP? It’s a full-on nightmare.

  Robin: Yes, somehow I was hoping no one else in the whole world would find out about it.

  Andy: People are still thinking about that shitstick?

  Miranda: I haven’t seen it? Link?

  So that’s how I found myself hunched over the lab bench by the GC/mass spec staring into my phone with acid churning in my stomach.

  PETER PETRAWICKI IS SORRY AND HE’S GOT A PITCH FOR YOU

  Peter Petrawicki still sees himself as both a hero and a villain. But now he’s traded in his suits and television appearances for life on the beach in Puerto Rico. He’s thriving in a society where he’s a little less recognizable, and a lot less in demand. He’s literally sipping a daiquiri in a short-sleeve button-down the first time we sit down to talk, but it isn’t long before the conversation turns from his Spanish lessons and his new beachfront property to his mixed feelings about the culture war he wasn’t just a part of, but helped create.

  “I didn’t know what I was doing, I didn’t realize how much pent-up hatred there was in the country. I deeply regret a lot of what happened, obviously. I even regret a lot of what I said.”

  It’s clear that that admission isn’t easy for him. Petrawicki has always been a zealous opponent of censorship, even self-censorship. He references the “free market of ideas” at least a half dozen times in only a few hours of chatting. Ultimately, though, I have to bring up April before he talks about her.

  “I respected April a great deal. I still do. I think we were having a necessary debate. I never wanted anyone to hurt her. The fact that those people”—he’s referring to April’s kidnappers—“ended up being so tightly connected to Defender ideology is something I struggle with constantly, and that I’ll be struggling with every day for the rest of my life.”

  I put down my phone and stood up. After August 5, when both April and the Carls vanished, anyone who called themselves a Defender was not going to have a good time. The FBI caught the guys who lit the warehouse on fire, and they were all obviously and proudly Defenders. They were still out there, but only the most scary and extreme ones still called themselves Defenders. They had been pushed deeper into private chats and seedy message boards and loosely affiliated angry YouTube channels. These were all things that I tried very, very hard to never think about or engage with.

  But there were also all of the people who had been Defenders but just didn’t want the label anymore. They weren’t murderers; they just thought April was a traitor who was better off dead. They wouldn’t have killed her, and it was terrible she was murdered, but they weren’t exactly sad she was gone. If she was gone. Lots of people believed she was still around doing bad things for humans, and many more people were just on the edge of believing it. The only control in the world I had was over the Som, and anti-April conspiracy theories weren’t tolerated there. Everywhere else, though? I think the idea was, what’s the harm in attacking someone who’s dead?

  I wasn’t running the Som anymore. We thought hard about just closing it completely—after all, it was built to help people solve puzzles in a dream we no longer had access to. I didn’t have a passion for it after April was gone, and I honestly didn’t have a grasp on how huge and deeply connected the community there had become.

  But people made it clear that it was bigger than the Dream. Lots of people used it as simply an alternate social space, but it was
uniquely suited to investigative work. Journalists used it to outsource research, conspiracy theorists used it to collect their leads, and then of course there were the reality games. That new class of gamers found the Som infinitely useful and were happy to continue paying a low monthly fee to keep the service alive.

  So we didn’t shut it down, but I had to leave. I’m not even sure why. Part of it was that running a start-up is exhausting, but with the dramatically lowered stakes I didn’t have the same fuel. More importantly, I wanted to go back to my old life. Not because I missed it, just because it was less painful. So I passed the torch and went back to Berkeley.

  PhD students who just vanish for a year aren’t usually welcomed back with open arms, but Dr. Lundgren, my advisor, hadn’t even fully packed up my space yet. We’d kept in touch a little bit, and she said she was keeping my slot open because my research was so promising. But was it? It was incremental. I know that’s true of most research, but I wasn’t changing a paradigm; I was adding to existing knowledge. The more I thought about it, the more I figured that the fact that I had done so many big, public things and become a little bit famous made everybody much more sympathetic. It felt a little like cheating.

  I don’t blame April for not ever telling you anything about what I was doing in my PhD program, or even that I was in a PhD program, but basically . . . well, OK, I’m really bad at basicallys. You know how a computer chip is made of silicon semiconductors? Well, there are a bunch of other materials that aren’t silicon that can be used in the same way that have different advantages. They might be cheaper or more flexible or thinner or whatever. Well, the thing I was working on was a kind of organic semiconductor gel. The idea is to make it not just flexible but squishy and wet. This is only really good for one thing: putting it inside of living bodies.

  Scientists have been working at UC Berkeley for a long time on tiny sensors and nerve stimulators that can be implanted into people (though mostly just rats so far). But hard chips can only get so small, and in any case it would be a better experience all around if the sensor felt a little more like soft organic bits.

  It is very difficult for me to not keep explaining, but I think you get the point: squishy computer chips for use inside of living things so that you can have a tiny Fitbit inside of you telling you, in real time, whether your blood sugar is crashing or you’re having a heart attack. My research was an attempt both to gather signals from the nervous system and to send inputs into the nervous system. It was potentially interesting research in everything from diagnostics and scanning to prosthetics, and I could not for the life of me figure out how to care.

  I got back to Berkeley, and somehow my lab had only partially been torn apart by people who needed equipment for their own experiments. I was able to put it all back together pretty quickly. But the thing I had been so excited about before now felt like busywork. Knowing that technology as elegant and powerful as Carl’s existed in the universe made me feel like a monkey banging rocks together. I’m sure part of this was grief, but I think part of it was the post-Carl depression that a lot of people were dealing with.

  The day I read that Petrawicki article, I was working on assembling my little jellies using literal laser beams to push impurities into the perfect places before letting the gel solidify. I was basically making Jell-O, except instead of pears and marshmallows, I was pushing around individual atoms. With lasers.

  It sounds cooler than it was. Someone else had built the laser robot; my lab just bought it. All I was doing was typing instructions into the program that would control the laser. This was not terribly cerebral work, so my mind kept drifting back to the article and Peter Petrawicki’s new island life. Was this his redemption arc? It was so nice of him to apologize to a magazine reporter who was doing a puff piece on him. Had he apologized to April’s parents? To Andy and Maya and Robin? To me? I must have missed the email. And it’s also nice to hear how many struggles he’s had. That’s definitely something people need to be worrying about.

  Of course, I stopped filling in the numbers my circuit CAD program had spat out and went back to the article. The writer continued:

  Peter Petrawicki is not a changed man, though. He’s driven, sure of himself, and believes that anyone standing in the way of the path he sees as right is dangerous. But now, without the Carls looming on the streets, his anxieties have turned elsewhere. I ask him what his biggest fear is, and he stays silent for thirty seconds before replying.

  “You met Taggart on the way in.” He’s talking about the island dog that he adopted. It’s medium-sized, medium-haired, medium brown, and of medium disposition. If there is a purebred dog in Taggart’s lineage, it was many generations ago. “I love Taggart, and I think Taggart has a good life, certainly better than he had before we met. He gets fed twice a day, he gets to run on the beach, we cuddle up and watch TV. Taggart has literally everything taken care of. And when Taggart starts to decline and suffer, I’ll decide for him when he should die, because that’s the appropriate thing to do. Taggart does not even think to question his life. Everything that happens to him, he accepts, both good and bad, because he isn’t even capable of imagining that he can affect his own life. When we go to the vet’s office that last time, he will have no idea what is happening. He will just go to sleep, and it will be just one more thing that happened to him.”

  We sat there for a while. I stayed quiet, even though I didn’t really get where he was going with all of this sad dog talk.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of, that we will become like that. I’m worried that we will outsource our satisfaction, and that our lives will get sucked into the nothingness of video games and television and shockingly realistic virtual pornography. We will just get satisfied, and never drive ourselves forward. Society is fraying—the impact of the Carls, whatever you think about them, is clear. We’ve lost our way, we don’t have a vision for the future anymore.”

  As he continued, it starts to feel like a speech he’s given before.

  “I don’t think that the last two hundred thousand years of human suffering will be best brought meaning by humans today living like dogs—accepting what has been given to us as unquestionably inevitable and, ultimately, when it gets taken away, seeing that as just another part of life. I want to fight every bit as hard as my ancestors fought to keep my lineage alive, to make me possible. I don’t have to fight”—he gestured to his daiquiri—“but I owe it to everyone who came before me, and to everyone who will come after, to push humanity forward, maybe to even redefine what it means to be human.”

  I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get goose bumps when he finished that monologue.

  While reading this, I also got goose bumps. The kind you get when you go to pee in the middle of the night and suddenly start wondering whether there is someone in your house. The article continued a while, fleshing out PP’s ideology, but then finally they got to the point. Or at least near it.

  Peter’s house is not just a house; it’s part of a compound. There are dorms for workers, offices, server rooms, laboratories.

  “That’s where we’re doing the mining.” He gestures toward a huge cinder block building with no windows. He means the cryptocurrency mining. “Before we make our initial offering, we want to have a fairly significant supply on hand to match with our ability to supply our service.”

  He only calls it “our service” during the entire meeting. The fact that I am writing a feature article that is about a service that is secret and has not yet been launched is more than just unusual. In fact, it’s something I would never do and, if I did, something my editor would literally fire me for. But Peter Petrawicki’s “service” has received investment from some of the wealthiest and most influential people in the world. His first round of funding came in at over a billion dollars. And he’s not doing it alone. Researchers in neurophysiology, cellular neuroscience, quantum computing, transistors, biomedical engineering, optoelec
tronics, optogenetics, data science, artificial intelligence, and robotics have all left tenured faculty positions or jobs at Google, Microsoft, and Apple to come work for Peter Petrawicki and his partners.

  I leave Puerto Rico with a lot of useful thoughts, but my overwhelming emotion is confusion. Dr. Kress’s contributions to neurology are undeniable, but he remains a complicated and controversial figure. And that, of course, is true of Mr. Petrawicki as well. The combination of celebrity scientist and celebrity pundit is certainly unusual, but it might be, like a reality TV president, the sort of thing that isn’t as surprising as it seems at first glance. I am not convinced that whatever they have going on is not a colossally huge scam. When I asked, Peter didn’t even try to convince me. Instead, he replied with his newfound relaxed demeanor but his traditional bravado: “Real or fake, either way, this is going to be huge.”

  You probably have some idea of how upset I was feeling after finishing this article. It really wasn’t that Peter Petrawicki was the sympathetic protagonist of this fluffy magazine article; it was that he was winning while April was dead. He was getting everything he ever wanted, which was mostly other rich white dudes telling him how amazing he was. My response wasn’t anger, though. It was just pure, sweaty anxiety.

  I don’t have to explain most of the reasons to you. It sucked hearing anything from Peter aside from “I screwed up, and I owe it to the entire world to live a quiet and anonymous life donating money to global health charities.” But I had another reason. I had some idea of what scientific advancement might require the breadth and depth of talent Petrawicki was acquiring and would also get a lot of billionaires very excited.