A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

by Hank Green

  I finally thought of how my hesitation must look through April’s eyes. To come back and find that her best friend was enthusiastically enjoying a creation of the man who might be most to blame for her murder.

  How had I ended up here?

  “Of course we will,” I said, fully chastised. “We’ll take it down and I’ll love doing it.”

  Relief spread over April’s face, but I caught a hardness in Maya’s eyes.

  “What tools do we have?” April asked.

  “Well, since we’re sharing secrets, I have a few. I have a large social media following, and a lot of people listen to me. I’m also on track to be one of the first fifty people with access to the Altus Premium Space. I also am one of only a dozen people who collaborate on an anonymous video journalism channel called The Thread that reaches tens of millions of influential people.”

  Maya gasped at this. “You’re The Thread?” she said, almost as an accusation.

  “No, The Thread isn’t one person. It’s a group of people. I was invited in, and we construct the content together. I have no idea who is in charge—everyone is anonymous. Only one person knows who everyone is, and no one knows who they are.”

  “That’s a big fucking deal, Andy,” she said.

  “Well, I have one more thing on the list, which is that I have a hundred fifty million dollars.”

  Everybody’s eyes got big then.

  “What the hell have you been up to? And what is The Thread?” April asked.

  “Jesus, all I did was find April,” Maya said.

  I looked at Carl, who blinked very slowly and then said, “I gave him some very good investment advice.”

  “I FUCKING KNEW IT!” I said. “Can I tell them?”

  “Yes,” they said.

  “Carl here has been dragging me around by the dick with a secret, all-knowing book.”

  “Oh. Yeah, I got a book too,” Maya said.

  “Me too,” Robin added, holding his up.

  “Fuck! Why were you giving us all books?” I said, staring at the monkey. They looked unfazed.

  “You will continue to get them. They are the best way for me to communicate without the possibility of detection,” they said.

  “Well, I hope you know it was completely terrifying,” I said. And then, turning back to the topic at hand: “So I have a hundred fifty million dollars, access to The Thread, potentially access to the Altus Premium Space—what do you guys have?”

  I had tried to gloss over my status inside of Altus, but I couldn’t lie about it either.

  “So you’re going to be one of the first people to really know what Altus is?” April asked.

  “Maybe. I hope so.”

  She thought about it for a moment and then said, “That’s going to be extremely powerful. Andy, I have to ask you to do something, and it’s going to suck. I want you to go all in on Altus. I want you to be a champion for them. People are going to hate you for it, but you will be our inside man. And when you turn away from them, it will matter because you believed in it.”

  I let out a long breath. This was exactly what I wanted to do, but I didn’t want them to know. “But, Andy,” Robin said, ever the clear thinker, “if you do that, you have to know that you’re going to get sucked in. And you can’t let yourself forget why you’re doing it. OK?”

  “I can do it,” I said, relieved that it seemed like I was going to get to keep my friends and my Altus habit.

  “So what are our other assets?” Robin asked.

  “Miranda is in Val Verde right now, though it’s not easy to talk to her,” I said. “Maybe we can count on her for something at some point.”

  April added, “And we have an artificial intelligence that can inhabit a monkey. That has to count for something.”

  “You’re forgetting something,” Maya said, like it was something really obvious.

  “OH!” April said. “Yeah, and I can Google stuff with my mind!”

  I just stared at her.

  “Also, the special skin, it seems to be very strong. I punched a hole in a car. Also, when Maya got shot, it healed her.”

  I stood up from the couch. “What? Go back! Go slower!”

  So she did. She told us the whole story and it took a long-ass time, but it was a good story, so no one minded.

  At the end, April listed our assets out loud.

  “So we have a hundred fifty million dollars, a sentient monkey who is also a superintelligent alien AI, access to a massively influential anonymous video-essay platform, a mole in Val Verde, a high-level Altus user ready to turn his coat when needed, and a woman with superstrength who is capable of Googling things with her mind—that’s me.”

  “I mean, that’s pretty good,” I said, “but I don’t know how it helps us take down Altus.”

  Maya looked at April, and April looked down at her lap. “I guess I also have what I’ve always had,” she said, a little sadly. “An audience.” I didn’t even notice that Maya had been holding April’s hand until she let it go.

  Nothing is inevitable.

  APRIL

  Andy didn’t want to leave us, but the sun went down and Carl told him he had to go home and sleep in his own house. And so, eventually, Maya and I were left alone to squat in a four-thousand-square-foot high-rise apartment with our pet alien monkey.

  It felt wrong, to be sure. It felt like both trespassing on whoever owned the place and trespassing on society for enjoying something so decadent. Did I take baths in the giant soaking tub with a view of both the Hudson and the East River (and everything in between)? Yussss. But I had complicated thoughts about structural inequality while I did it.

  Maya had set Tater up in the nicest spot in the house. We certainly didn’t need the sunlamp anymore. Suddenly the tiny leaves were flourishing. It was the only plant in the whole place, which I guess made sense for a vacant apartment.

  Andy had brought us a computer, and apparently Carl didn’t have any problem hacking the Wi-Fi, because it was on immediately. But that didn’t mean that I wanted to hop back on social media. I mean, I did, but also I did not.

  “I just hang out on the Som,” Maya said to me when I brought it up.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  She smiled at me. “It’s not the same, of course. People use it to work on reality games or indulge in conspiracy theories. There are a lot of people there looking for you. They actually put me onto your trail.” I could tell that was a long story. “Anyway, you shouldn’t go on Twitter.”

  “I’m going to have to eventually, right? It’s one of our assets.”

  “I know, I just don’t want you to,” she said while handing me the laptop. “I guess this is what life is.” You would think that literally dying would make it so that you don’t care about how many followers you have on Twitter, but, like, just between you and me, I did. I spent the next hour looking through the hundreds of people who had sent me @replies just in the last day, trying to get a feel for how I was being imagined.

  Holly

  @accioawesome

  OMG look at this adorable picture I found of @AprilMaybeNot and @AndySkampt chowing on In-N-Out. I miss her.

  1 reply 3 retweets 6 likes

  Chris in Hell

  @edens_halo

  It’s legit gross that @realDonaldTrump has a Hollywood walk of fame star when legend and literal angel @AprilMaybeNot doesn’t.

  3 retweets 12 likes

  Saskia

  @saskiab

  Going for an @AprilMaybeNot look this AM. That girl had style.

  2 replies 0 retweets 9 likes

  Dan Burdick

  @RenoDan203854

  President Ashby is so clearly talking at the regular with @AprilMaybeNot. Every word that comes out of her mouth is so fake. We all know who is actually in charge.

  5 replies 2
4 retweets 49 likes

  Cat

  @Catriffic

  Sometimes you have a real shit day at work, and then you remember, hey, at least you don’t have to hear @AprilMaybeNot’s voice every fucking day anymore.

  0 replies 2 retweets 10 likes

  Here I was, a reconstructed humanlike thing with literal superpowers, still getting my feelings hurt by randos.

  “I looked up that sofa.” Maya had walked into the room, and I hadn’t noticed. “It’s a Fendi.”

  “Fendi, like the fashion label? They make couches?”

  “They do.”

  “Do I want to know how much it costs?”

  “Probably not. How is the internet?” she asked me, still standing.

  “Oh, y’know, things are apparently pretty bad,” I said, making a show of closing the laptop.

  “They’re just calling it ‘the Crisis.’ Not ‘the Financial Crisis’ because it’s bigger than finances. I think we all just forgot what life is supposed to be for. People haven’t adjusted.”

  “Can we talk?”

  “Yeah.” She sat down on the couch next to me. “So, I got shot.”

  “You got shot.” We hadn’t talked about it. The boiler room had been too strange, like another world where we didn’t have to think about reality, but now we were in the world again. “Are you OK?”

  “Physically, yeah, I think so.” She lifted her shirt to show me, and there, just under her bra, was an irregular, pearly-white spot in her dark skin. Around it was a bloom of purple and red bruise. I felt sick looking at it. Not because it looked gross—it honestly didn’t—but because of what it meant. And what it had almost meant.

  She pulled her shirt back down, wincing a little with the movement. Then she dug into her pocket and brought out a milky-white stone with flecks and veins of iridescence flashing through it. “I think you should have this,” she said.

  I took it in my right hand; it felt hollow and cool. Then I looked down at my left hand, still smaller than it had been, still with only four fingers. I put the stone in my left hand and . . . it vanished. It slid into my hand like dropping water into water. And then, the hand rippled and, as we watched, my pinky finger grew back.

  “Where the hell did you get that?!” I nearly shouted, staring at my re-formed hand.

  “At a flea market in New Jersey,” she said.

  I stared at her. And then she told me her whole story. Brooding for months, storming out of her parents’ house, chasing dead dolphins and bad internet, lugging around a potato plant, and running from crazed reality gamers. It was proper adventure! “Well, thank you,” I said when she was finally done. “For coming to get me. I don’t know what I would have done if I had opened that door and no one was there.” I shuddered. “Or worse, if someone else was.”

  * * *

  —

  Before Andy left the apartment to go back to his work getting into the Altus Premium Space, we had concocted a very rough plan.

  1. Always have our ringers on in case Miranda texts again.

  2. Always be ready to move at a moment’s notice. Bags packed and ready to go.

  3. Begin a whisper campaign against Altus. Right now, they were a big, shiny new thing. Everyone either loved them or didn’t understand them, so there was no pushback. If public relations was going to be any part of taking them down, that work was going to need time to spread.

  The only thing that was clear was that Carl couldn’t just destroy Altus. Even if it was something their programming would allow, which I don’t think it was, they were not physically powerful enough to work against the desires of their brother. Indeed, Carl was in a kind of hiding. Their brother wanted Carl gone as much as he wanted me gone. I remember the exact words Carl said to me one night in that apartment, because I can do that now: “He doesn’t care about what the outcome is, he only cares about the level of certainty. He wants control, and you and I both represent challenges to that control. He wants me dead even more than he wants you dead. He is the god I was told to never be.”

  The problem with starting a communications campaign against Altus was that I had to communicate.

  * * *

  —

  Since we were now in a four-bedroom apartment, Maya and I, without discussing it, chose our separate rooms. So did Carl. They were sleeping in the smallest room, which was staged as a little boy’s room for potential buyers.

  On the second night, after we had gone to bed, I got up and softly knocked on Maya’s door.

  “Yeah?” she said. I opened the door, seeing the bed in the dark, silhouetted against the view, which from this side of the apartment was clear all the way down to the Financial District.

  “Hey,” I said at the door.

  “Hey,” she said, rolling over in bed.

  “You know, there are blinds on that window.”

  “I’m never going to have this view again.” And that was true. Maya was wealthy, but not this wealthy. “It feels like you can see everything from up here,” she said, “but really you can’t see anything.”

  Things were falling apart. Tent cities were popping up in Central Park. Shelter space had filled up years ago, but now the homeless population was exploding. But from here, everything was perfect and beautiful. The world felt immortal and inevitable, but it was actually brittle and breaking.

  I sat down on the bed. “A few days ago, I said I was sorry for not listening to you. You were right. You tried to stop me. I fucked everything up. But . . .” I had prepared what I was going to say while lying in bed by myself, but that didn’t make it easy. “But that’s not the thing I’m sorry for, really. That was just another piece of the same mistake that I’ve made over and over again. I’m sorry I put you last. You were the most important person, and I put you at the bottom of my list.”

  “April,” she said.

  “No, I’ve got a whole thing prepared, let me do it. I’m sorry because I was terrible to you, but I was also terrible to myself. I know I’ve got self-worth issues. I just found out I was chosen as an emissary by an alien envoy to represent and protect the human race, and still I spent the afternoon searching for validation on Twitter. But I know that you are a good, strong, beautiful, talented person, and you loved me, and literally if that isn’t enough, nothing is. So, thank you for loving me, and I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you, April.”

  And then I realized that she might think that I thought that if I said the right words we’d get back together. I didn’t want her to think that, so I stood up.

  “I just couldn’t sleep.” I started walking out the door.

  “They were good words,” she said. “Good night, April.”

  “Good night.”

  AN EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK OF GOOD TIMES

  There isn’t anything I can say that will prevent you from skipping this week’s recording of Slainspotting. It’s a shame. You shouldn’t, but I’ve run the simulations and you now value your new mission too much, so you’re going to make a bunch of bad decisions. This is what he’s counting on. And who am I to say that you shouldn’t? You need to work hard right now. You are going to spend the day lying on your bed with a VR headset on instead of maintaining your relationships. Please do not forget, however, that you are a person and not just a tool. The Good Times are about more than just getting stuff done.

  Oh, also, it’s time. Sell everything and buy AltaCoin. Right now.

  ANDY

  That week I canceled our recording of Slainspotting.

  Jason was pissed, but he was nice about it. “I know, you’re obsessed with this Altus thing, you’ve got a chance at Premium access . . . Go for it. But if you skip next week, I’m gonna be mean about it.”

  But I couldn’t record Slainspotting. April was back, The Thread was relying on me, and humanity was at stake, so I had to lie in my bed completely s
till while constructing objects to make my breezy spring day more appealing than other people’s breezy spring days! I had a sun that moved through the sky, rising and setting if you wanted it to. I had some starter trees that came with the pack, but other people were specializing in trees, so people mostly bought other trees and put them into my environment. The wonderful thing was, there ultimately wasn’t that much I could do to make the environment better.

  When I wasn’t in the Altus Space, I was in The Thread, where, with one day left before the Premium selection, I had good news.

  Twelve: Hello all, there’s less than twenty-four hours left before the week ends and the first fifty are selected. I have good news, I’m in the top fifty and things look strong.

  Five: What? I’ve barely left the Space and I haven’t cracked the top 200.

  Twelve: I got in early with a good idea. Can’t tell you more without threatening to give away my identity.

  One: @Twelve, congratulations, this is amazing news. Please do not share any more if you think your identity may be compromised. But having someone who has access to the Premium Space will be extremely helpful. I haven’t been able to gather any intel about what makes it so appealing, though it seems a number of people who played Fish have access. Fish players seem like they would practically kill to get in.

  It was a big deal when One dropped in on a conversation, and it felt good to have their approval. One was the only person in The Thread who had no identifying details attached to them. But after that quick chat, I logged back into the Altus Space to find that I was no longer in the top twenty-five. In fact, I was getting terrifyingly close to not being in the top fifty at all.

  I started checking new entrants to the top list. I was keeping track of the bestseller ranks just in case there was something I needed to be aware of. People tended to focus on homes, clothes, decor, or natural settings. But suddenly, there was a solid dozen people in the top fifty who were selling what appeared to be cheap little trinkets. Small statues, pins, coins, badges, that kind of thing. They didn’t look appealing for any particular reason, and any of them would be fairly easy to re-create, so I didn’t see why they would be doing so well.