A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

by Hank Green

  I promise this is all going to become relevant.

  Scientists studying the Dream while it was still active had figured out the trick of Carl’s Dream: Detail wasn’t that important. Our dreaming minds would fill in the cracks. But then, when that detail was created, it would be outputted from our minds and into Carl’s systems for everyone else to access. Carl built the framework, but collectively, the Dream was built by Dreamers.

  This is really elegant, even beautiful, but it is also terrifying. It meant that Carl could harness the abilities and efforts of our minds. Carl had used it to make the Dream, but I had to wonder what else that ability could be used for.

  Here’s what I know about internet media companies, which, to be clear, Altus was going to become: They will do whatever they can to make money. Oh, certainly they’re all run by idealistic-sounding progressives, but when it comes down to whether or not to use their customers to make more money, they will do it.

  The basics of the Dream was all publicly available knowledge, but it wasn’t really satisfying because no one had any idea how any of it actually worked. How did information get into and out of our brains? Where was that information stored? How was it processed? For the Altus Space to work, they needed to have figured that out. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew they had done it . . . they had hacked both an input and an output system for the human brain. Never mind whether any of this was safe (and no one knew whether or not it was since none of it had been used by anyone for more than a few months)—I was absolutely not going to welcome a private company into me. What could they do with that power? Plenty. My mind got exhausted just running through the possibilities. I was pissed off enough about what Facebook did with my personal data; I wasn’t going to give a bunch of start-up bros access to my literal mind.

  The product was obviously not ready for release anyway, and it felt like they were using Altus employees as test subjects.

  What I did not know—and, indeed, no one I talked to knew—was that it had already been launched. People were using the system. No control, no prescreening, no DATA COLLECTION even. They just fucking put it out there and crossed their fingers!

  But again, I didn’t know that at the time. Instead, every night I would lie in my bed and think of all of the amazing and/or terrible things that could be done with the Altus system.

  Their planned business model was public knowledge, though, and it was disappointing enough. The only thing Altus was going to give away for free was the ability to make things that you could sell. Of course, nothing could be bought with anything but their currency, which they controlled.

  A few weeks after I arrived, every employee got a headset with the Altus software loaded onto it. The Altus induction signal we received did not provide access to anything except the development platform (which is what Andy was using in his last chapter) and a few stock objects. I was never even tempted to put my headset on, but it was so fundamental to the culture of Altus that every single person with access spent every available moment inside the Space that I pretended to use the system as much as anyone else.

  After hours, nearly every employee of Altus closed themselves in their rooms to play in the development space and have god knows what done to their brains by this company. The initially jovial feel of Altus completely evaporated after headsets were distributed, as people spent less and less time in public spaces. But that was actually good for me . . . it made it easier to sneak around.

  I was a spy, and my intel gathering was going very well. It’s true that Altus kept a close eye on me, but they also needed my skills, and I was working on a project that was about successfully encoding memories so that one person could live another person’s experiences!

  So when I say the Open Access Space was child’s play, that’s what I mean.

  But every piece of communications infrastructure I could find was locked down. It wasn’t like, “You can’t hack this computer”; it was like, “You can’t touch this computer.” Computers that connected to the actual internet were literally behind doors guarded by armed men.

  I still had my international cell phone, which I’d kept charged. I had taken it for an evening run once, which felt very risky, but there was no cell phone signal anywhere.

  Which brings me to my absolutely ludicrous plan.

  See, there was a soda carbonator in the rec room. We didn’t have any good ways of getting replacement cartridges, but we did have big-ass carbon dioxide tanks in the lab. So once or twice a week, whoever finished a CO2 canister would take it to the lab and refill it from one of the big tanks. But here’s the thing: You can put any gas into one of those canisters—it doesn’t have to be CO2.

  So one day, I went to carbonate a bottle of water and an empty canister was sitting next to the carbonator. I grabbed it and put it in my bag. I went to the lab, did my work, and then, around lunch, told my supervisor I’d be a bit because I needed to refill the canister.

  All of our gas tanks were stored outside in the same area, and since refilling the SodaStream canisters was such a common chore, one of the big CO2 tanks had the adapter screwed onto it all the time now.

  While standing in the wide-open air in full sunlight where anyone could walk by at any moment, I grabbed a wrench and removed the adapter from the carbon dioxide tank. In the Caribbean humidity, my hands sweaty, heart pounding, I attached the adapter to a low-pressure hydrogen tank and started filling the purged CO2 canister with an extremely dangerous, flammable gas.

  “There you are!” I jumped and turned around to see Sippy and Peanut.

  “Jesus,” I said, “you scared me.” Now, unless you looked at the labels, all of these tanks looked roughly the same, so I wasn’t immediately hosed. “I’m just filling up the SodaStream canister,” I said, because what else would I be doing!

  “Yeah, that’s what your supervisor told us,” Sippy said. “So, we have news, you want to tell her?”

  Peanut looked better, but his confidence had clearly taken a hit by him being “incompatible” with the Altus Space. That’s the language people here used, “compatible” or “incompatible.” People like Peanut were quietly called “incoms.” There were only a few known incoms, and they were thought of with a mix of pity and neglect. Loving Altus Space was such a central part of the identity here you could sense people’s discomfort at the idea of incoms even existing. As far as I knew, no one else knew about Peanut yet.

  And since most people spent their evenings in the Altus Space now, Peanut was left tremendously bored. Sippy had, somewhat valiantly, mostly kept out of the Space in order to keep Peanut company, but I didn’t know how long it could last.

  “I want to try and get back in,” Peanut said.

  I swallowed. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I said, looking at Sippy, not at Peanut, but also thinking mostly about the little hydrogen canister hissing quietly as it filled behind me.

  “No, I mean, of course not. It was bad, but I could go through it again. It was just a nightmare. It all happened in my brain, not in my body.” His shoulders were hunched forward, and he looked even littler than he was in another of his ill-fitting knitted wool hats.

  “I don’t know that there’s actually any difference between what happens in our minds and in our bodies,” I told him.

  “I get it, but it can’t hurt to try, right?” His Alabama accent was more apparent than usual. “So I’m going to try again tonight. Can you be there?”

  I didn’t know what to say, both because I didn’t really understand the question and because I kinda already had plans for that night. Also, I had just built a small bomb behind me and would probably go to Altus jail if anyone found out.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  A strain came onto Peanut’s face as he searched for an answer.

  Sippy, confident in his skin, with his muscles and his perfectly straight black hair, answered this one: “Lo
ok, I think it’s just nice to have some friends around no matter how it goes.”

  Right, of course. I was the support team for if it went badly.

  Nut was such a good guy, and all he wanted in the world was to get into the Altus Space. I wanted to help him, I really did. I also wanted to bring this whole thing down.

  * * *

  —

  After work, we all met up in the cafeteria and then walked back to the dorms together. As we were leaving, security checked my bag, and I did everything in my power to act like it was just another boring day. Laptop, great. Tampons, cool. SodaStream canister stuffed with highly flammable gas, also fine! Don’t worry about me, just the long, stringy redhead who is fascinated by this company’s mission and nonetheless planning to destroy it. I’m making a joke here, but honestly I was starting to feel a little bad about what I was doing. A lot of these people were . . . nice. And the research they were doing was amazing. And only hearing about it from one angle, Altus’s angle, was making me feel like maybe it wasn’t so bad. But it was. It was bad. Very bad. And if all went according to plan tonight, people besides me would know about it. I stashed my contraband and then went to meet with Sippy and Nut. Their room was neat and sparse, as were most rooms at Altus, and Nut did indeed have about twenty hand-knitted wool hats.

  “Can I have one of these?”

  “What? Why?” Peanut asked, laughing.

  “I dunno, you have a lot of them. I get cold in my room sometimes.” This was a lie, but I was getting better at lying.

  I picked one I hadn’t seen him wearing much, assuming that meant he wasn’t a huge fan of it. He told me to help myself.

  “OK,” Peanut said after we’d all chatted a bit. “I just want to do this thing, let’s not push it back any further.”

  “We got this, bud,” Sippy reassured him. “Just like we talked about. Your eyes are in your head, feel your body, and keep your bearings. We’ll go straight from the launch screen into the body.

  “OK, dude, lie down,” Sippy said, handing the VR headset to Peanut. “Feel your body. Just like every other day of your life.”

  Peanut slipped on the headset and lay down on his bed.

  “OK, see y’all on the other side,” he said.

  His body went suddenly still as he entered the Space. This was my first time watching someone go in. It’s so subtle, but still obvious—just the littlest adjustment upon their consciousness fleeing their body.

  What we were hoping for was nothing. If, after a minute or two, we’d seen no reaction at all, then we’d know it had worked. He’d be in there and enjoying his first nightmare-free excursion in the Space. Then Sip and I could celebrate, even if Peanut was in another world for it.

  And then his body cramped together like a fist. Sippy was at his side in an instant, pulling off the headset. Peanut came out of the Space with a rough and ragged scream.

  Sippy’s voice got loud and strong, but still somehow gentle. “You’re out. It’s over. You’re here.” Peanut was crying now. I knelt down beside his bed and put my hand on his hand. He grabbed on and squeezed painfully tight.

  “It’s all right. Remember, it was just in your mind,” I said, repeating his own empty words back to him.

  “I’m . . . OK,” he said as he got his breathing under control. “Jesus, fuck,” he said quietly. “I wish I could explain to y’all what that’s like, but fuck FUCK!”

  “Was it any different that time?” Sippy asked.

  “Yeah, it was. Not better. But different, yeah. I don’t really want to tell you about it, though.”

  “That took a lot, to go back in,” I said. “We don’t think any less of you . . .”

  “Yeah, I fuckin’ get it!” He bit off the words. I lurched away from him. I listened back to my own words in my head. Even I, someone who literally didn’t use the Space, sounded like I was pitying him.

  Immediately, he backtracked. “I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry I yelled.”

  “No, it’s OK, I understand. I sounded like an asshole. I get it.”

  He started crying then. The shock was wearing off, and now it was just the desperation of not being able to experience this amazing thing that no one else could stop talking about. I was honestly amazed he was brave enough to just sob in front of us both. I squeezed his hand and held my breath and felt my own tears coming down in sympathy.

  “I think,” he said, “I think I just want to go to sleep. Can the three of us hang tomorrow?”

  “Yeah,” Sippy and I said at the same moment.

  “Yeah, of course,” I added.

  “I’m still going to take this, though,” I said, touching the hat I was still wearing.

  He laughed, though it wasn’t really funny.

  I said my goodbyes—there wasn’t a lot of energy left for easy banter. I went by the rec room and saw that it was entirely empty. People were in the Space. Why wouldn’t they be? I grabbed the soda carbonator and a handful of condoms and went to my room, where I began the process of destroying poor Peanut’s hand-knitted wool hat. I tried not to think about the fact that his mom probably made it for him while I cut and picked until I got a loose thread that I could yank on. The entire hat was gone in a matter of minutes, reduced to two very long pieces of yarn that I then tied together. Next, I started unpacking and unrolling condoms. Unfortunately (for me anyway) they were lubricated. I screwed the hydrogen canister into the SodaStream and began the long, slow, boring, careful, dangerous work of filling fifteen condoms with hydrogen.

  * * *

  —

  I had tested it, and the phone tried to send a text message for about a minute after I hit send. I also knew that there was a town just on the other side of the mountain from us—I’d seen it on the flight in. My hope, and it was only a hope, was that the balloons, in the course of one minute, would be able to lift the cell phone high enough to overcome the interference from the mountain (and/or whatever jammers Altus was using) and send a single text.

  It was 2:30 A.M. when I finished. I had tied Peanut’s yarn around each of the condom balloons, making a big, long jumble. Then I tied the cell phone just below the balloons and typed out a message, designed to be under 160 characters, just in case this dumb phone couldn’t get more than one packet out.

  Im OK. Texting is hard. Altus Tech relies on reactivating the Dream/using it for their own. Not in PR, Val Verde. Please reply now.

  I assumed that Andy and Miranda would be asleep on the East Coast, but there was a chance that Robin or Professor Lundgren would still be awake. But the odds of that were going down every moment. Just for safety, I put Maya, Andy, Robin, and Professor Lundgren in the “to” field, shoved all of the balloons out the window, pushed send, let go.

  Hydrogen is half the density of helium, so it’s twice as good at yanking things into the air. The yarn started burning as it moved through my hands, so I just dropped it, putting my foot on the end. It probably wasn’t much more than three hundred feet, and I felt like the mountain was much higher than that.

  I kept my eye on the Altus-issue alarm clock on my nightstand. It would take one minute max for the text to go out, but I wanted to give my friends as much time as possible to write out a reply.

  I have never been fishing, but this must be what fishing is like, right? Except with condoms and text messages instead of bait and fish.

  I let an excruciating half an hour go by before I started reeling in the balloons. It took way longer than I expected. Eventually I figured out that if I wrapped the yarn around my pillow as it came down it sped the process up substantially. I also wrapped one of my T-shirts around my hand because I was starting to get a blister.

  Eventually, I yanked all my still happily inflated condoms into the tiny dorm room and checked the phone. My heart leapt when it saw the screen. Two new messages on the group chat, TWO!

  Professor Lundgren: Miranda! Well d
one! I don’t know how you did it but I’m sure it wasn’t easy. Altus’s tech has already been released, so we know about the Open Access Space. I looked up Val Verde and it’s in the middle of nowhere! Do you have any more specifics on where the lab is? Google Earth doesn’t show anything, but it hasn’t updated that part of the world in several years. Thank you for this information and keep in touch. You are doing a great job.

  Maya: You’re not the only one who’s had a weird week. I want very badly to tell you my news, but I’ve been told I can’t. Stay strong. We know exactly where you are. Send word if ever you need us. Code word Americium, OK?

  I typed out another 160-character message.

  Final txt. no clinical trials before launch. Broken Bad Ethics. PP is watching me. Fairly large town just over a mountain from us. Confirm Code word Am.

  I left it up for another half hour and pulled it down again to find my message had sent and I’d received a ton of messages in the group chat.

  Andy: Maya! You’re back! Congrats, Miranda. Everyone was saying it wasn’t in Puerto Rico. But this is the first anyone’s heard about Val Verde. You scooped that one. Have you been to the Premium Space yet?

  Robin: Andy said it, freakin’ proud of you. Can’t wait to hear this full story.

  Professor Lundgren: Your friends are cool, Miranda.

  Andy: Duh.

  Maya: You guys are really bad at appreciating the severity of situations. Miranda, don’t take any risks. Please. I can’t tell you all our news yet, but I wonder if you brought your little green dress with you to Val Verde?

  That was a weird message. The green dress? The only little green dress I had was one I had worn literally one time, to a movie premiere with April. Maybe Maya had seen a picture?