A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

by Hank Green

  “The Altus Space does not show you things, it gives your brains impressions of things that it interprets as a reality. For example”—she gestured to herself—“Altus did not design me, Altus is not telling you what I look like, it is giving your brain a signal to call up an attractive young woman. What that looks like to you is your brain’s decision, not ours.”

  Mercifully, Alta didn’t give me time to spend with this unique new shame, and she continued.

  “We allow you to create your objects in the Open Access Space, but what we send out are your mind’s impressions of that object. So, here in the Premium Altus Space, we have two main services. Our sandboxes are custom environments filled with objects more detailed and usable than what has, thus far, been created for Open Access users.

  “But second, and more importantly, we are also able to capture the experiences of people in the real world. And you can enter those experiences, whether they are reading a book, hiking a trail, or doing acrobatics. These experiences are not like anything that has ever happened to you before, and they are not easy to explain. Luckily, it’s very easy to show.”

  Suddenly I was walking through some kind of tropical forest. Or someone was. I was a person who was walking through a tropical forest. They were thinking about the plants there, about a tree branch that had fallen since their last walk. They knew that they were hoping to see a particular kind of bird. The name of the bird didn’t enter their brain, but an image of the bird did. It was small and black with a bright yellow belly.

  I was . . . thinking their thoughts. I was in their memory. And I felt everything. I felt the burn in my quads and an unfamiliar tightness in my ankle. I smelled the sweetness of the leaf litter and felt the trickle of sweat rolling between my shoulder blades. But still, I also maintained enough distance from the experience that I could consider it. I was inside and outside at the same time.

  And then the vision ended and I was back in my Altus Space with Alta.

  “People have varying reactions to this,” she said, “so understand that it is normal to be a little freaked-out right now. But yes, Altus can capture moments of other people’s minds, store them, and then map them to yours. You cannot read a book this way, but you can inhabit someone else’s mind as they read a book. You can’t go into a boxing ring and fight, but you can inhabit someone else as they fight.

  “The story of humans is the story of the escalation in speed of information transfer. That began with language, expanded with writing, and exploded with the internet. And now, another exponential shift, a new kind of giant leap for mankind. You can be inside a business leader’s mind as they make decisions. You can understand the thoughts of people you disagree with. And most powerful of all, people who inhabit people as they play sports, or do math, or think critically gain those skills at a much faster rate than those who practice during waking hours. The Altus Space will not only fundamentally change recreation; it will fundamentally change education, connection, politics, and all human interaction.

  “Welcome to the Premium Space. Take your time, learn your way around, and take the opportunity to become a better you.”

  It was impossible for me not to imagine the power of a tool like this. A doctor could use it to diagnose a patient! A person’s pain would no longer need to be a mystery! Empathy would no longer need to be an exercise in imagination. We could literally feel each other’s feelings. And what about learning? If I inhabited the body of someone playing piano, I could understand their mastery much faster. And then, of course, there was the Adult menu I had noticed before. The temptation to check that out was strong.

  * * *

  —

  When your body experienced discomfort while you were in the Altus Space, it filtered through, even if dampened, and just then I felt a pushing pain in my side. “Exit,” I said, and then I pulled off the headset. Bex was standing over me. I think she had just kicked me! Not hard, but hard enough.

  “Really?” she said, her hands on her hips. She was only wearing her underwear, and I couldn’t help but take her in.

  I sat up. “I just wanted to see . . .” And then I trailed off.

  “Yeah, OK,” she said, and then she started searching around for her clothes.

  “Bex, look. I screwed up. It was just too compelling. I thought I’d drop in for a second.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said as she pulled her shirt over her head.

  “It’s not an excuse, it was shitty. I’m really sorry.”

  “Yep.” She was pulling on her pants now.

  “Can I walk you to the train? We can talk.”

  “Not right now, no,” she said, not meeting my eyes as she walked past me and out of the room.

  I sat down on my bed and waited to hear the door to my apartment close. I pulled out my phone and wrote several texts to Bex, all of which I deleted before sending.

  “Fuck,” I whispered.

  There was no way to fix what I’d just done to Bex, at least not right now, and my VR headset wouldn’t stop staring at me. I lay down on my bed and went back into the Space.

  In there, I discovered that experiences like the one I’d just enjoyed could be purchased. In the Open Access Space, an object might, at most, cost 10 AltaCoin, which was, at the moment, around twenty-five dollars and going up as demand for the currency outpaced supply. In the Premium Space, there were no experiences for sale for under 20 AltaCoin, and they were regularly in the hundreds. Of course, I had enough AltaCoin to last a dozen lifetimes, but clearly if this product was here to revolutionize the way we learn and think and interact, it was going to do it for rich people first.

  MIRANDA

  I had no cell phone, no window. There were armed guards between me and the outside, and no one would even talk to me, much less talk about letting me outside. I had no access to internet of any kind. I didn’t even have access to a computer terminal. All I had was an Altus headset. I didn’t want to go into the Space, but eventually boredom wins. I had been given a job, and even if I knew it was useless, doing something was better than doing nothing.

  My job now was no longer anything to do with understanding how Altus’s (or, rather, Carl’s) brain interface worked.

  I was what they called a “client.” Clients were people who made content for Altus. This was some wild doublespeak, as it seemed to indicate that Altus worked for us, when in reality, we clearly worked for Altus. I never saw the room full of “clients” who were mining AltaCoin. Instead, I walked back and forth between my sleeping room and a private room, where I sat and built a learning sandbox.

  Altus could either capture and share the direct experiences of someone else’s mind, or they could build environments, shape by shape. But there was no way to scan images into the Space, which made things like books basically impossible to reproduce. You could experience someone else reading a book, but you couldn’t read it yourself.

  In this way, Altus experiences were a kind of ultimate laziness. Not only could you skip the reading part, you could just fall into someone else’s thoughts about the book. You didn’t even have to do the work of imagining.

  But if you wanted to have an environment you were in control of, it had to be a sandbox. I was tasked with creating classroom sandboxes. It was hugely labor-intensive, and ultimately it felt like a futile project because real classrooms are not about the rooms; they’re about people gathering.

  It felt like busywork for a prisoner, and I knew that was exactly what it was. No one yelled at me or called me a traitor; in fact, no one said anything to me at all. I just didn’t get to do anything useful or see anyone, and I never got to go outside.

  But in my off-hours, I was allowed to go into the Premium Space. It’s a little upsetting how quickly I caved. I went from thinking I would never go back into the Altus Space again to using it every chance I got. But it was the only way I could get out of the high-security wing. In the Space, I could go
outside and feel my fake legs running my fake body around in sandboxes created by other clients. I experienced strangers connecting with each other and it was almost like talking to someone. And so, ironically, the Altus Space became my only respite from the prison that Altus had put me in.

  It was infuriating, but I had no choice but to just chill and handle it. If I could just keep pretending I wasn’t in prison, I wouldn’t feel like a prisoner.

  That was only going to carry me so far, but maybe it would carry me far enough.

  * * *

  —

  I had become obsessed with learning more about what was happening at the end of the hallway. How were they taking care of those people? Where did they bathe? When did they eat and go to the bathroom? How were they being compensated? Did anyone have any idea what the impact of such long-term and unrelenting exposure to the Altus Space meant?

  Peter Petrawicki had gone from stoking terror about the invasion of our minds that the Dream represented to sending people into it without rest or respite. I still got to control my own schedule at least, so I started to time my breaks once every hour. During that break I would walk myself down the hall to see if I could spot anyone moving in or out of the room.

  Every day, I staggered it so that I would break five minutes later than the previous day. Over the course of two weeks, I’d been in the hallway at every time of day and had never seen a single person enter or leave the room. They must have been watching me, I thought. They were watching me to make sure that I was never in the hallway when they did a shift change. Maybe that was also the reason why I hardly ever saw anyone in the little cafeteria. There was nowhere for me to go. I had the cafeteria, my sleeping room, and my working room. If I didn’t have the Altus Space to find refuge in, I would have broken.

  I found myself blaming everyone. I blamed Peter for being a truly awful person, but my brain couldn’t stay focused on one person forever, so I blamed Andy and Professor Lundgren for saying I should come here. I blamed all of these people who worked for this terrible company. I was isolated in my powerlessness, and skipping through all of the reasons I had ended up here. Usually, I just blamed myself.

  * * *

  —

  So, basically, what I’m trying to say is that I thought I had it pretty rough during those weeks. I thought what they were doing to me was kidnapping and imprisonment.

  And then, one day, I was in the cafeteria, eating microwaved ramen noodles when, in the middle of my field of vision, a very large tube of ChapStick appeared. It was about a foot long, unopened, and the diameter of my upper arm. It very clearly said “ChapStick” on it, so it at least wasn’t a knockoff. I walked to it, placed my hand on it, and felt it, cool and slick, but it didn’t move; it just hung there, locked to its position in the air. Then it vanished from existence just as it had appeared. No noise. Nothing.

  I pulled out a chair and sat down, knowing without a doubt what had just happened. I knew where I was . . . where I had been for weeks now. I understood why I’d never seen that door open, why no one ever talked to me, why there were no books to read. Giant ChapSticks don’t just appear . . . unless you’re in the Altus Space.

  “Exit,” I said as calmly as I could. Nothing happened.

  The powerlessness welled up inside of me, and for a moment, just a moment, I felt like I was drowning . . . plummeting through the ocean with weights tied to my feet. It was one of my greatest feats of will to not scream and cry and tear at the walls.

  But I didn’t know if they were watching me somehow. I needed to be calm. I needed to act like I didn’t know. I didn’t know how this kind of surveillance would work, but if I had any chance of acting on my own behalf, it would be best to hide the fact that I knew that I was not sitting in a cafeteria.

  I was never in my bed. I was never in my workroom, never in the hallway between them. I was in the Altus Space. I had not left in weeks. When had they put me in? Or had I put myself in, and they just faked me waking up one day? When was the last time I’d talked to a human being? Was it Peter? Was it all the way back to Peter?

  It had been weeks! How was I eating? How were they cleaning me?! When had I gone to the bathroom?! What . . . what were they doing with my body?

  Worst of all, there was no way out. I could not pound my fists on the door of my own consciousness. I was locked in a room inside my mind.

  A new flash of rage came, this time at myself for not having figured it out sooner. But that didn’t matter now. I was in a prison like no one had ever been in before. That was bad. But it was also good. Brand-new designs always have flaws, and I was already starting to work the problem.

  MAYA

  Andy didn’t even text me about his screwups. I wish I could have been there to help him work through it, but April, Carl, and I were having our own drama.

  Living with a monkey during those weeks was actually fine. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was weird. But it wasn’t like living with a normal monkey. They fed themself and cleaned themself, and they went to the bathroom in the bathroom.

  My bigger problem was that, as I had promised, I had not forgiven Carl.

  They were affectionate with April, occasionally riding her shoulders or nuzzling up to her on the couch, but they knew not to try that with me. One day, Carl was curled up on the opposite side of the couch from me and I asked, “What are you thinking about right now?”

  The little monkey head raised from where they had been lying on their hands and they said, “That is not a simple question for me to answer. I have parallel processing streams, so I am thinking about a lot of things.”

  “Well, then what is one of the things you were thinking about just then?”

  Carl turned their head to the side, as if pondering the question. “Around 20 percent of my processing power, at any given time, is currently devoted to an ongoing dispute I am having with my brother over control of sensory capacity on the Altus campus. So I am always thinking about that dispute. It’s a war of a kind, though he has far more resources, so I am basically just keeping him annoyed while trying to glean information about Altus. I’ve got little things, some access codes, some locations. I know where Miranda is.”

  “Is she OK?” I asked immediately. There was so much going on that I kept forgetting that Miranda was in such a precarious, even dangerous, position.

  “Yes, at least the last time I was able to check on her, which was around twenty-eight hours ago.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us? We’ve been so worried about her!”

  “I would have told you if anything was wrong.”

  “Can you check on her now?”

  The monkey sat up, leaning back against the leather of the couch, and said, “I can try.”

  And then, within a moment the little animal flinched. Carl’s eyes closed tight and their mouth opened wide, showing a massive set of teeth, including two giant fangs. The monkey spasmed, every muscle clenched, and then they screeched and, at once, collapsed, limp and unmoving.

  CARL

  Imperfect analogs for what I am:

  I am a global network of hundreds of billions of trillions of tiny computers gathering, storing, and processing data.

  I am a sentient, planetwide nervous system without a body.

  I am an infection that thinks.

  I can’t explain precisely what it is like to be me any more than you can explain precisely what it is like to be you. But, honestly, it isn’t so different. Yes, I take in more data than you, but you and I both sense, store, and analyze. Much of the analysis is subconscious; neither of us looks at a tree with red leaves and thinks, I have to examine each one of these leaves. We think, That’s pretty, I love fall.

  I do not have a body, but I do exist physically. And like any organism, I fear for my physical parts. I was programmed with systems to make me want to keep my parts safe. You have those systems too. Some are conscious, like o
ne knows not to have unprotected sex with that gorgeous stranger, even if they definitely want to. Some are subconscious, the fear and anxiety when a literal snake appears in the grass. But some are not part of your consciousness at all . . . namely, pain. Pain exists to tell us the body is being or has been damaged so that we can make it stop or avoid it in the future. Pain is unpleasant, but sometimes we need it. And so I was given pain, but I had not felt real pain until that moment.

  My infiltration of Altus was sly and incomplete. I did not need to process there, only to sense and retract. My brother had nearly completely scrubbed the Altus campus of my presence, but ultimately, there’s just too much life to know you’ve done a complete job. I no longer infected any of Miranda Beckwith’s cells, but I had done work occupying the bodies of fruit flies. Their eyes aren’t great, but my image processing is very good.

  But while the parts of me that gathered data were always active in these animals, I quarantined them from the rest of my body, almost like an epidural block. They were still a part of me, but they could not communicate with me. If my brother could find a way into my network, he could hack deep into me in nanoseconds. He had grown so much stronger just in the last few weeks. I needed to isolate myself. This is why we often occupy the same organism, but we never occupy the same cell. I’m sorry if this is too much detail.

  The point is, when I entered my fruit fly network at Altus to check on Miranda, I found that I was not alone in those cells. He had not wiped me out, which he could easily have done . . . There were very few fruit fly cells compared with all of the nearby living cells he had exclusive control of. Instead, knowing I would come back, he just waited, ready. And the moment I arrived, he struck. He sliced deep and fast with a prepared attack, and before I knew it he was already in one of my processing centers, which were interconnected through big, beefy signals with the entire rest of my self. I had no choice: I needed to amputate the node. But also, before I did that, I needed to send a signal, a signal to Miranda. Something simple, anything that would make her situation clear. With the rope-burn sensation of my brother’s attack coursing through me, I sent the first thing I could think of, and then I amputated the node.