by Hank Green
“Actually, y’know what, I do care. I just hate that I care. I care that you would say whatever it took to get on TV because that means you didn’t hurt me and the world for something you actually believed, you only believed it because it would get you attention.” He opened his mouth to talk, but I just kept going, leaning over the table toward him. “I guess maybe that was true of me too, so maybe that’s why I hate you so much, because you and I are the same thing. I think I’m better, but who knows, maybe I’m not. Maybe you really have convinced yourself that you’re some Alexander the Great, ushering in change, and the role you play is actually important. But that’s always been a lie. There are no great men, only moments when power is unleashed, and then dicks like you turn theft and murder from taboos into tools. Really you’re just falling into the well of your own power. And for you, it isn’t even your power because you have no control anymore, you’re just a variable to be manipulated, and you beg for it. You’ll beg to be a pawn as long as you get to look like the king.”
“Well,” Peter said, trying to sound calm even though his face was flushed and he was gripping his hands to keep them from shaking, “now that you’re done with your little outburst, why don’t you tell me why you’re here.”
I almost killed him. I don’t mean I wanted to kill him. I mean . . . that comment made me so mad that I almost smacked him as hard as I could, which, with my new body, would probably have divided his head in half. Luckily for us both, I stopped myself.
“I’m worried about Miranda,” I said instead.
“Well, I think you’ll see her very soon. In fact, I imagine the two of you will be spending a lot of time together.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. And then I realized this wasn’t part of the plan. I needed to stall him longer.
“I mean, what we are doing here is too important for anyone like you to stand in the way of it. You live a reclusive life now, and it seems that your pilots didn’t even file a flight plan. You say I turn theft and murder into tools, but they always have been.” His tone wasn’t scary because he sounded evil. He sounded sad, like he didn’t want to have to kill me, and that was more terrifying than any malice.
“I imagine it will be a fairly long time before anyone even notices you’re gone. By then, it’ll be too late. Altus doesn’t exist in any country, the government of Val Verde is . . . very cooperative. Who is going to stop us?”
But then, as he talked, I felt my mind suddenly grab ahold of the thing it had lost. It was like I had been locked into place on a roller coaster, but the car was free again. Carl had brought down whatever was blocking our ability to connect to Altus.
“I just love this,” I said.
“What?” Peter replied, looking unsettled. And then his look of concern deepened as the overhead speaker in the conference room started playing a creepy electric organ sustaining a minor chord.
“How massively you underestimated us,” I said. “You actually thought I came alone. You really thought I would make the same mistake again.”
The music crescendoed, and then static broke through and the organ dissolved into digital tones and distortion.
“I love it. So. God. Damn. Much.”
Peter called out to his muscle in the hall, “Get in here!”
They came into the room, and then I surrendered my body to Carl.
* * *
—
Three drum hits came crashing through the overhead speakers. On the first beat my fist slammed into one of the guard’s ribs. I ducked under his counter on the second beat, and on the third my legs straightened as my left fist reached high and fast into his jaw. I watched from inside my body as his head snapped back fast enough that I worried he might be seriously hurt. But it wasn’t something I had done, just something I had watched myself do.
Carl had spent time in my body; they had gotten to know it as they were repairing me. And now the full force of their processing power was dedicated to moving my body through space. I wanted to watch as the man slumped to the ground, but my eyes flicked instead to the two men who were rushing me from outside the room. Before I knew what was happening, I had flattened myself to the floor. One man missed me completely and crashed into the window behind me. I heard the safety glass tinkling down in a waterfall around him. The other guy had stumbled to a stop before me, but Carl’s foreign strength coursed through me and I rocketed myself off the floor, my head connecting with the man’s body, just at the base of his sternum. I felt it crack. He stumbled backward, gasping for breath. It was the man who had taken my phone. I stepped inside his guard and, like a trained thief, darted my hand into and out of his inside suit coat pocket. I found myself holding my phone as my leg swept under him. His feet went up and his head went down, knocking solidly into the hard carpeted floor. The music was so loud I couldn’t hear any of their grunts or groans.
My eyes flicked to the doorway, and there I saw the only guard who was still standing reach under his jacket. I tried to shout over the music, but the music shouted back the first words of the song. I turned to the side and then the gun went off—POP—over the sound of the music. I felt the bullet hit, and I staggered under the sharpness of the pain. I threw my phone and then ran toward the man. My phone got there first, knocking into the guy’s head, distracting him before he got a second shot off. My left hand grabbed the gun. It went off again as I ripped it out of his hand and then threw it across the room. Then I bent back down and came up holding the phone. I looked down at it . . . four bars. Not just a signal, a strong signal. Maya and Carl had been doing good work.
I turned around and didn’t even have time to process what I saw before my body ducked and weaved to the side. The man I had sent through the window was back up, cut and bleeding, but now swinging a small bat at me. No matter what he did, it wouldn’t connect. My body was just never in the space where the bat went—until my left arm shot out to block it. The bat splintered as it struck the arm, which then extended into the side of the guy’s face. He grunted but stayed standing as I felt a hand wallop me on the side of the head. My senses spun, and Carl’s control loosened with them and I dropped to one knee.
“Seems like forever . . . and a day,” Electric Light Orchestra sang.
They were standing on opposite sides of me, one bleeding and bruised, the other fresh, having just entered the fight, but both standing in professional stances. I couldn’t even really see both of them at the same time.
Then, as fast as I had lost it, Carl locked back on. Energy exploded in my legs and I twisted around, feeling the centrifugal forces tugging at my cheeks as I spun. My ankle cracked across the fresh guard’s skull, pushing his head toward the ground as, somehow, my feet ended up back under me.
The bloodied guard, I have to respect it, he stayed in the fight. As he lunged at me, I leapt straight into the air and tucked my knees up to my chest. His face crashed directly into my left knee. He fell backward, limp and unconscious.
And then, like that, my body was mine again, and the music faded.
“Jesus . . . Jesus Christ,” I heard Peter’s voice say. I had forgotten, in those moments, that he was in the room.
“Same,” I said, breathing hard, “that was wild.” My heart was thrumming. Whatever Carl had done hadn’t bypassed my stress response.
“He shot you,” Peter said. And I remembered that he was right. The bullet had hit under my left arm, but that entire half of my body was covered in the Carl Stuff. I felt at it with my hand and, sure enough, the blazer I was wearing was in tatters under my armpit. The bullet must have shattered when it hit me, shredding the fabric.
“I guess he did,” I said. And then took out my phone and opened the camera.
“Hello, I’m here at Altus, where a bunch of people just tried to kill me. I came here because a friend of mine, Miranda Beckwith, got a job at Altus, but has, for the last month, completely ceased any communication with us. U
ntil we found a note from her inside the Altus Space saying that she’s been imprisoned here. I have not yet found her, but I did find Peter Petrawicki.” I turned the camera to him. “Peter, why don’t we have a little chat . . . on the record while you take me to my friend.”
“Might I remind you we found you trespassing here at Altus and you assaulted several members of my staff just now.”
“Oh,” I said, turning the camera off, “so that’s how we’re going to play this?” I jumped over the conference table to where Carl had thrown the gun when they were inhabiting me. I picked it up off the floor and then jumped back over.
Peter’s eyes were wide, and every muscle in his body clenched when he saw I was holding the pistol.
“You’re going to take me to Miranda,” I said, crouching down beside him with the barrel of the gun in my left hand, “because otherwise I will absolutely break every single one of your fingers.”
I squeezed the gun’s barrel, and the metal groaned and snapped as it yielded to the power that Carl had given to me.
“What are you?” Peter said, his voice quavering.
“Ugh,” I said, standing up, “I wish I knew.”
MIRANDA
Altus had forgotten about me. They would let me work, but they also didn’t care if I didn’t. I had given up on getting a message out. I had given up on everything. I thought if I made it clear that I knew I was inside of the Altus Space that they would take me out. I assumed they were monitoring my heart rate at least, and that must have told them that I was in distress. But hours and days and weeks kept passing, and nothing happened. I walked the halls of the building that they had constructed for me to exist inside of, and then I ran through them, and then I ran up the walls, I tore things from shelves, I screamed, but always I knew I was just rearranging synapses in my mind and nothing more.
I hadn’t spoken to another person in, how long? How would I even know? But the thing that kept me locked perpetually on the edge was that I knew my friends had not forgotten me. My mind had always wanted me to believe they weren’t really my friends, but when faced with the question of whether they could abandon me to this, I found something solid. They couldn’t. I believed that, even if they didn’t find my note, they would come for me eventually.
And so I went into the Altus Space inside my Altus Space and I tried things out. I looked to see what the most popular experiences and sandboxes were, and sometimes I was disappointed, but sometimes I found some freedom in them. I was trapped, and I had to fight constantly not to wonder what was being done with my body, but I put it out of my mind and I waited. I had done the work, and I believed the gang would fight to free me. It would happen.
And so it was that I was experiencing a young woman playing with a kitten in the Altus Space, when my eyes suddenly filled with the light of ten thousand suns.
“Wha . . . what . . .” My mouth felt gummy, not, like, dry and sticky, but just weak and slow.
As my eyes adjusted, in front of me, I saw Maya’s face, and as much as I knew it was always going to happen, the relief that slammed down into me was so heavy that I nearly broke under it.
“OH GOD,” I said, and I lunged forward at her, not yelling, just without any volume control. “OH GOD THANK YOU.”
She held me so tightly and whispered into my ear, “It’s OK. You’re out now. I’m sorry it took us so long.”
I pulled back as I had a sudden and terrifying thought. How did I know this was real? How would I ever know anything was real ever again? I looked at her through my tears and saw her own cheeks stained. It was too perfect. Did they just build my fantasy for me?
“Did . . .” My mind tossed around. “I need to know you’re real.”
She looked at me, confused and then sad. “Oh, OK, that makes sense. Well, April told me about the dresses, and I thought that was a very mean way to tell you. But she didn’t want to risk the news being intercepted. I don’t think anyone else would know about that.”
I started crying again then, both with the relief that she was real and also with the shame. “I’m so sorry,” I said.
“About what?”
“About sleeping with April.”
Her laugh was like a thunderclap. She gestured to the situation, smiling. “OK, I accept your apology, I guess, let’s talk about it more a different time. Right now, I need to take some video footage of this bullshit, if that’s OK with you. We’re trying to spook all of Altus’s investors into selling us controlling interest in the company, and this room seems pretty spooky.”
I looked around. I was in the AltaCoin mine, sitting in a hospital bed like the hundreds of other people. Except those people weren’t doing anything but mining AltaCoin twenty-three hours a day.
As Maya took out her phone and opened the camera, I had a thought. I had been in the Altus Space for, at minimum, weeks of time. But looking down, I felt fairly fine. I hadn’t just been kept alive; I’d been kept healthy. I stood up out of the chair and did some quick squats. My muscles hadn’t atrophied at all. A wave of goose bumps moved over my body. There was only one way I could imagine that my body had been kept healthy during all of that time that I couldn’t move it.
Maya was just walking down the rows and rows of humans, filming. And then she turned to me and said, “Miranda Beckwith came to work at Altus”—the sound of her voice bounced around the giant room—“but she violated one of their rules, so, without her permission or knowledge, they imprisoned her inside the Altus Space.”
“That’s true,” I said. If my body had stayed fit after a month of bed rest and I didn’t move it, someone must have been moving it for me. “But, Maya, we should leave here.”
She lowered the phone down. “What?”
I looked over her shoulder and saw, as a unit, hundreds of men and women sit up in their chairs. Her eyes darted around, and she too saw what was happening. She lifted her phone to start filming.
“NO TIME!” I said, and I began to run toward the door. “RUN!”
We were around ten meters from the door. I was lucky my seat wasn’t on the far side of the room. As I ran, people in chairs all around me, in unison, lifted their headsets from their heads and placed them down beside them. My legs pumped underneath me. Oh god, it felt so good to run! I looked back and saw Maya meters behind, but my job was to get to the door at the end of the room and open it as fast as I could. A hand reached out and grazed my arm as I reached out and flung the door open and looked back.
I saw Maya scrambling, in her black hoodie and black jeans, as mounds of empty-eyed humans reached out for her. One had grabbed at her head, tugging on the hood of her sweatshirt and hauling her backward. She was just feet away from me. I pushed my foot into the door to keep it open and then reached out to her. I felt her hand wrap around mine, and together we yanked her body free. She tumbled through the door and I slammed it behind her. Thudding immediately came from the other side, and we both sat down in front of the door.
“Did you keep your phone?” my voice said, but it wasn’t me saying it. I tried to lift my hand to my mouth in surprise, but my hand didn’t move. I just sat, quietly, as Maya fished her phone out of her pocket. She showed it to me with a worried but relieved smile.
I wanted to tell her that something was wrong. I tried. And then I tried to scream, but my body would not obey. Having your consciousness trapped inside of a simulation is a nightmare. But now my mind was trapped inside a body I could not control. I sensed nothing of the will that had me; I could only make assumptions from the actions it took, and I had no power to warn Maya.
My hand reached out and grabbed the phone from her, immediately throwing it onto the ground, smashing it, and then picking it up and smashing it again. I looked out from my eyes, and in the glimpses I could catch, I saw Maya’s horrified look of wild fear. The banging from behind the door was getting louder. My body walked up to Maya and reached down. I was looking
at her eyes now, and I could see how confused and scared she was. She didn’t want to move away from the door.
“Miranda,” she said, but I could tell she knew it wasn’t me. “MIRANDA! NO!”
My hands shot out and, as panic washed over me, they wrapped themselves around her neck and began to squeeze. Maya was bigger than me, but she was shocked; she didn’t understand what was happening at first, and the thing’s will was concrete. She began to claw at my arms, punch at my face. I felt every blow, but my arms simply squeezed harder and harder.
The violence of it, the brutality. I can’t believe I have to write this. I know it was worse for her, of course, but to become the weapon of some other being was . . . I’m done. I can’t keep writing this.
MAYA
I knew it wasn’t Miranda. The moment she cracked my phone on the floor, I could see that she was gone. I should have reacted sooner, but I didn’t want to believe what was happening. Violence is about control, about power being taken away. I could still fight. I could beat my friend in the face, I could jam my arms against hers, I could kick and scrape.
But the violence that was being done to Miranda was absolute. I didn’t really understand the ruthlessness of Carl’s brother’s intelligence until that moment. His goal was only to create stability, and he had to abide by no rules. To him, humans died constantly, literally every moment of every day. If one stood in the way of creating the stability he sought, I don’t think he thought of himself as any different from cancer or a heart attack.
But I was not thinking about Miranda’s feelings as my lungs cramped and my head swam with her hands around my neck. I was thinking only about how I was going to get my next breath. I flung my fists at her, and her nose opened up, bleeding down over her pale white skin and into her mouth. I put my thumbs onto her eyes, but even then, I couldn’t bring myself to push into them. And besides, hurting her didn’t seem to be helping, so I went another direction. I just squirmed. I contorted my entire body, losing all connection to pain in my panic. I kicked and thrashed, and somehow, without knowing how really, I got one of my legs up above Miranda’s head, and between her and me. I straightened out, shoving her away from me. Her hands ripped from my throat, her nails tearing into my skin. But before I had time to think about that, I launched at her, knowing that the thing wasn’t going to let up. I wrapped myself around her, pinning her arms to her sides in a bear hug, and then I threw both of our bodies back toward the shuddering door.
