by Hank Green
I called him at seven o’clock at night, assuming I would leave a message, but he answered his phone.
“I’m . . . I’m sorry for calling so late,” I said, surprised and unprepared.
“Who is this?” He sounded a little agitated.
“It’s . . . Andy Skampt, we met in Cannes. You told me to call you if I knew anything that might be useful.”
“Oh, well, in that case, hold on a moment.” I heard him talking to someone in the background.
“Andy, you have my attention.” Not long into the conversation, I felt way out of my depth, and I handed the phone to Bex. They had been talking for a solid thirty minutes when they finally got to the point.
“I’m going to have to ask you to stop talking about this like you’re saving the world,” Stewart told us, exasperated. “I don’t know any of what you know, and also I don’t care. The only thing I’m worried about is whether there’s money to be made here. If there’s a transaction that is going to occur, I can charge you for that. If it’s a large transaction, I will make a lot of money. If you know that the value of Altus is going to plunge, that’s all that matters. We put together a trade, I call every single person invested in Altus, I scare the shit out of them, and then, when the bad thing happens, you buy the stock when they’re willing to sell at a low price. I don’t care why we’re doing it. It’s great if it’s a good cause, but if there’s money for me to make, why are you trying to convince me it’s good? Who cares. I’ll do it.”
Jason, Bex, and I looked at each other. I mean, I guess he was right. If you’re going to pay someone a bunch of money, you don’t also need to convince them that it’s the right thing to do.
“And how much money do you have to buy Altus shares?” he asked.
“Right now, like five billion?”
“That is not enough,” Stewart said.
“We think we can get more together soon.”
“Very soon?”
“Very soon.”
We hung up, and then Bex turned to me and said, “I think we’re doing this right.”
“I’m glad. I have never done a hostile takeover.”
“No, I mean the whole thing, because a book told me to give you this after ‘an important conversation about buying a company.’” I looked down. She was holding out a book to me.
“Goddamn it, Carl,” I said under my breath and then began to read it out loud.
This is the last time I’ll be in touch. After today, I will no longer be able to communicate with you. I hope you have learned things from our correspondence.
I also want to say, of all the people I have communicated with in this way, you have had the worst time. I wanted to make people’s lives better while I did this, but yours has gotten worse. This is a function of our working together toward a particular outcome.
So, I’m sorry this has been a rough time. Remember that music brings you joy, that making a podcast with Jason brings you joy, that playing games with friends brings you joy.
You will always struggle with not feeling productive until you accept that your own joy can be something you produce. It is not the only thing you will make, nor should it be, but it is something valuable and beautiful.
The last round of fundraising Altus did valued the company at over $500 billion. But we didn’t need to buy all of Altus, we needed to buy over 50 percent, so we just needed to convince a few very, very rich people that they were holding on to a deeply toxic asset and they would be lucky to get even 2 percent of their money back.
Anyhow, now that that’s all explained, we can return you to your regularly scheduled climax.
MAYA
The copilot walked into the cabin after our ears started popping with the descent and said, “We’re coming in on final approach, we don’t really know what’s going to happen when we land, so be ready, I guess.”
We had talked through a bit of the plan and at least knew what we were each going to do once we were on the ground.
“April, when we land, you may notice a difference in your ability,” Carl said. “I severed the node that connected me to Altus, which means that you will not be able to reach into the network. I am going to begin rebuilding that network from the inside when we land, but it will take time. You should notice if and when you reconnect.”
“I’m already disconnecting, I think,” April said. “It’s like . . . it’s like I’m trying to grab something, but my hand is passing through it.”
“Are you OK?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said without turning to look at me, “I’m fine.”
We landed uneventfully, and as we taxied down the runway, Carl and I went to the back of the plane and, well, we hid in the bathroom. I sat on the toilet; they lounged in the sink. I always expected Carl to smell like an animal, but they actually mostly just smelled like April, because they used her shampoo.
The moment the copilot brought down the door, we could hear someone yelling.
“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU THINKING! YOU CAN’T JUST LAND A PLANE WITHOUT TOWER CONFIRMATION OR FILING A FLIGHT PLAN! GOOD LUCK HOLDING ON TO YOUR LICENSE AFTER THIS!”
It was time to start the plan. I peeked out of my position in the bathroom as April walked to the front of the plane and then down the stairs.
“This seems fine,” I said to myself.
“Yes,” Carl said, ignoring my sarcasm. “So far, all according to plan.”
As April stepped down the stairs and into the light from the tiny terminal building, the guy stopped yelling, though I couldn’t hear what he was saying.
I sat in my thoughts, staring into space, trying to keep my breathing steady, and then, I finally asked Carl, “When do we go?”
“We just need to make sure that no one will see us when we leave the plane.”
“How long will that take?”
“About ten minutes.”
“How long have we been waiting?”
“Eight.”
It had felt like an hour.
“And then what?”
“And then we take out the cell phone jammers, and then we go get Miranda, and then we try and explain to the world how bad these people are and hopefully the price goes down low enough for us to buy it.”
“How likely is that?” I asked.
“I haven’t run the simulations,” Carl said.
“What?” This seemed like an oversight.
“Maya, this is it. This is the last chance. Altus is a black box to me, so any simulation I ran would have a very wide margin of error. But, more than that”—they sat up in the sink—“it doesn’t matter what the odds are. This is our last chance, and if I knew that the odds were very low, it would further decrease the odds, so I haven’t looked.”
“You’re really weird.”
“Oh well! It’s time to go anyway,” they said calmly.
It was warm, but I still felt myself shivering as anxiety battled with drowsiness. None of us had slept on the plane, and that had been a mistake. I followed Carl, not into the little airport but directly into the forest that surrounded the compound. Carl, of course, moved effortlessly through the mess of undergrowth while I stumbled along, every step sounding like thunder, my black hoodie getting caught on every branch it could.
“Seems like you’d be comfortable here,” I said, thinking maybe it was a joke, but really just wanting to say something.
“It is nice, actually—you keep the apartment too cool for me.”
“You never said anything,” I said, somehow feeling defensive.
“I didn’t feel like it would be well received,” they said, hanging in front of me.
“Are there any other monkeys like you here?”
“No, the only extant Caribbean monkeys arrived from Africa on slave ships, and there are none on Val Verde.”
“Are you . . . are
you reconnected to your network, then?”
“Oh yes, if I was not connected to the network, I would not be able to control the monkey. I have kept the bandwidth very low in the hopes that my sibling will not notice. Ah! Here we are.”
Ahead of us was some kind of electrical transfer station that was surrounded by a twelve-foot-high painted block wall. The monkey ran at it and tried to scramble up the wall, but the painted cinder block was too slick.
“I’m going to need you to throw me up there,” they said.
“Like, pick you up and toss you?” I asked, incredulous.
“Yes, I weigh around ten pounds.”
I grabbed under their fuzzy armpits and arranged them so that one hand was under the monkey’s butt. They were surprisingly light. A stringy, bony affair, awkward in my arms.
“You’re not great at this.” The voice was loud and quite close to my ear, making it clearer than usual that it came from the smartwatch around their neck.
“Jeez, it’s my first time, OK?”
“Here.” They positioned themselves so that one of their feet was gripping each of my hands. The monkey’s big toes were like thumbs, and they squeezed my hands.
“One,” they began counting, “two, three!”
On three, I flung my hands upward while their legs pushed off. My ribs creaked where my chest was still healing as I pushed, but the combined force of the two of us, and the boost of my height, was enough that their little hands had no problem gripping the lip of the wall. They pulled their body up and stood on the wall and then looked down at me.
“Maya, I’m going to drop in here and disable the cell phone jammer. Once I do that, I’ll be trapped inside—”
I interrupted, trying not to yell, “What?!”
The only thing worse than doing this with Carl, I realized, was doing it alone. “You’ll need to go get Miranda, in the high-security wing. It’s back toward the airport, you remember how to get there?”
We had gone through the plan, but Carl hadn’t told me we wouldn’t be there together.
“How the hell am I supposed to get past an armed guard?”
“I’ll take care of that for you. Once I do, just wave your phone over the keypad and then enter the code. You remember the code?”
“839-201,” I said. “How do we get you out of there?”
“I’ll make my own way out eventually. It will just”—they hesitated—“take some time. This body wasn’t going to be useful to you anyway. Do not think of me as being in one place. I will be with you.
“OK, I should have it disabled within the next five minutes or so,” they said, and then the monkey disappeared over the other side of the wall and I was on my own.
And so I went back into the woods and dragged myself through the leafy, dense undergrowth, trying not to trip and fall every six feet. I was not trained for this. I felt like my pants were full of bugs, and in my defense, the number of bugs in my pants wasn’t zero. Before that day, I had spent as much time in jungles as I had in outer space.
But I made it through. I had the giant cinder block building in sight after less than ten minutes of walking. Something in me hoped that the guard by the door would be sleeping, or maybe just gone. But no, a man in military fatigues stood next to the door. In his arms, he held the kind of rifle people take to wars.
Now was the time to just trust. I walked out of the woods and toward the building. What must it have looked like to that guy—this figure in a black hoodie and pants just stepping out of the forest?
“Hello!” I said, if only to be polite, when I was still thirty or so feet away.
“Hello,” he said, in a thick accent I didn’t recognize.
“I need to go into this building.”
“Do not come any closer.” He reached for his belt, which held a walkie-talkie.
I hadn’t thought about walkie-talkies! I was much more worried about the big ol’ gun. I stopped in my tracks, unsure what to do. He held the walkie-talkie to his mouth and then, all at once, he crumpled.
CARL
I left a surprise at Altus. I am technically a benign infection. But if my parts do not communicate with each other, they stop being me. They do not have consciousness, but that does not mean that they disappear, or even that they stop infecting new cells. When I severed my connection to the parts of myself that were at Altus, that did not destroy them. They just stopped being me. And in the moment before I snipped that thread, I sent a signal for those bits of me to hide, to change shape, to go stealth, and then to infect everything they could.
And I believed that they would go undetected by my sibling. I believed they would spread. I believed it because that was the only way we could succeed. If my sleeping network had been detected, it was all doomed anyway. But when that guard collapsed in front of Maya, I knew it had worked. That was a true test of signal strength, to interrupt the consciousness of a man that my sibling had so completely infiltrated.
Of course, it was like a beacon to him. I had hung a sign on Altus that said “Under Attack,” and I could already feel his response rising.
APRIL
I heard a man yelling as I walked to the front of the plane. “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU THINKING! YOU CAN’T JUST LAND A PLANE WITHOUT TOWER CONFIRMATION OR FILING A FLIGHT PLAN! GOOD LUCK HOLDING ON TO YOUR LICENSE AFTER THIS!”
But then, as my face was lit by the lights coming from the building, his frustration faded.
“Jesus,” he said in a mix of awe and exasperation. “Umm . . . come with me, I guess.”
And so I left the plane, alone.
Once inside the tiny terminal, I sat for about fifteen minutes before a group of five dudes came into the waiting area. One of them was Peter Petrawicki.
“April, this is a surprise honor.” He stuck out his hand.
I knew that this would happen, but that didn’t mean that I was ready for it. I hadn’t spent much time with anyone except my best friends since I got my new face, and now here was my archnemesis, in a crisp blue button-down and khaki pants flanked by hired muscle acting like nothing at all odd was going down.
“Peter,” I said, and I reached out and grabbed his hand, smiling. Normal, normal, normal!
“Do you want to go have a chat? I’m sorry if you caught us a little off guard. It is the middle of the night.”
“Yeah, that’s my bad,” I said, sounding cool, but feeling very small, very alone, and completely terrified. “It just seemed suddenly urgent that I come visit you,” I said.
“Well, let’s get to a conference room and we can talk about it. But first, I hope you don’t mind, we’re all about secrecy here, can you hand Davis your phone?” He gestured to the biggest of his companions. They had clearly all hastily dressed, but nonetheless each had a jacket on that could very easily be concealing a gun. I handed my phone to Davis, thinking that this plan was terrible and that I hated everything about it.
As he led me out of the hangar and through a courtyard toward a large building, Peter Petrawicki did what he did best.
“April, when I heard you had come back, I was . . .” He paused for dramatic effect. “I was just so relieved. The part I played in your story was not a kind one, and you owe me nothing. But I hope that you know I never wanted anything like that”—and then he turned to me, gesturing vaguely at my body, small and overshadowed by the bulk of him and his companions—“like this to happen to you.”
We walked past a huge cinder block building with no windows. That, I knew, was where Miranda was being kept, and the thought of her made me stronger. It made it clear that this guy’s talk was nothing more than the most distilled bullshit on the planet. That didn’t stop him from spewing it, though.
“I felt deeply responsible for what happened to you. I still do. What a foolish campaign I was on. I was chasing the high, that was all. Now, what we’re doing here”—he gestured around at
the giant, curving building we were approaching—“is real change. You can’t change the world on cable news. You actually have to do something. And we’re doing something amazing.”
I was starting to realize that he was just giving me a modified version of a speech he’d given dozens of times before, possibly to every new high-level recruit that landed on the island. He opened the door for me, and as I walked through it, I felt the fear biting at the back of my throat as I said, “Yeah, and all you needed to do it was sell yourself to the space aliens that you got famous by despising.”
I saw a flash of anger in his eyes, but it was gone just as fast.
He didn’t say anything more until we were alone in the conference room.
“What do you know?”
All of the bullshit had suddenly been washed away. I realized that the flash I’d seen in his eyes wasn’t anger; it was fear. He was afraid I knew something, but what? And it came to me. When I’d said that he sold out to the aliens, I meant that he’d been using the changes in our brains Carl created to make Altus work. But it was more than that.
“How long have you been working for him?”
“For who?” He sounded completely confident in his denial.
“You didn’t do this. You never could have. Maybe you’re able to pretend that some benevolent scientist is feeding you all of these systems to make Altus work. I’m sure you’ve had to do a ton of work to make it look like you’re doing work, but you have to know who actually did it.”
“We have some of the best minds in the world at Altus. We’re not just messing about. We built this.”
“OK, sure, except I saw your eyes.” I stood up from the table. “You know who you really work for. You’re just being moved around on the board like the rest of us. Just like Carl found me and made me their game piece, something else found you. I don’t care about you, you’re just the human face.”
And then I kept talking as I worked things out.
