by Hank Green
Her body was twisting and writhing inhumanly in my grip. I was heavier and stronger than her, but she had the stamina. She was a runner—she could wiggle and twist all day long. I felt myself getting weaker as she continued to kick and wiggle and push at my arms.
Minutes passed.
My shoulders began to burn; sweat and blood made my arms slippery where they grabbed each other. I couldn’t do this. I started crying. This wasn’t who I was; it’s not what my life was supposed to be.
“Miranda, if you can hear me, I know it’s not you. I know it wasn’t you.” That seemed like the most important thing to tell her. “It’s OK,” I said through my tears. “If you kill me, I’ll know it wasn’t you.”
Then she went slack. The banging at the door behind us stopped.
I didn’t dare let go.
“Maya,” she said, breathless and terrified and racked with sudden sobs. Through them she managed to gasp, “Don’t let go.” She coughed and sobbed but then seemed to gather herself. “Whatever it was, it’s gone, but I have no idea whether or when it can come back.”
And then, at the far end of the hall, the door that I had come through after walking past a receptionist’s desk cracked open. The wide hall we were in was oddly plush, with dark green carpet and a high ceiling and wood-paneled walls. At the end, coming through the door, was Carl.
Not monkey Carl, robot Carl. Its massive bulk ducked through the doorway and then stood, full height. The robot walked slowly toward us. And then it staggered, as if it had tripped, or was maybe a little drunk.
It continued to walk toward us, steadily now, before finally leaning over the bloody, bruised, messy pile we had formed at the base of the door. It reached out and gently took one of Miranda’s wrists in its massive hands. I let her go and pushed myself away from both of them. Carl held Miranda so that I didn’t have to.
“Huh,” Miranda said, her eyes looking up and to the right. “Interesting. I guess that makes sense.” But I didn’t know what she was talking about. Mostly, I was just suddenly very happy that she was still Miranda. Still figuring things out that no one else could see.
Carl kept ahold of Miranda’s wrist in their massive hand as they turned and put their back to the door. Silently, Carl and Miranda sat down together. I couldn’t tell which one looked more defeated.
APRIL
You have nothing, you know,” Peter said as he walked me across the warm early-morning darkness toward, I hoped, the place where he was keeping Miranda. “No one is going to believe you anyway. You broke in here, you attacked people. You’ve always hated me, and it will just look like more bias. What do you think you’re going to achieve? We haven’t done anything wrong.”
I assumed he said that last part just in case I was still recording audio, which, honestly, I should have been, but I hadn’t thought of it.
He wasn’t completely wrong. We had to convince a lot of people who thought that they were going to get wealthy beyond their imaginations that, in fact, their investments were worth next to nothing. I hadn’t gotten any good dirt on Altus. Peter had been perfect the moment I turned the camera on because of course he had—that was his job.
He had imprisoned Miranda, but if that news came from me, it would just look like we were trying to make them look bad. But we had The Thread. The Thread was credible and had broken big stories before. We just had to get video of Altus being immoral to The Thread, and they could plug it into the video they were nearly ready to release. If we could do it soon, we could get it up before the East Coast was even awake.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, “you really think you’re the good guys?”
He was looking ahead at the door to the building we were walking toward. I looked over his shoulder and saw a man there, crumpled on the ground. I could see fear dawning in him, so I reached forward with my left hand to hold his right and said, “Don’t run away now, Peter.”
I’ll admit that I was enjoying freaking him out. For so long now, I had felt like he was controlling my life. He’s what turned me into a pundit. He created the legions of people who made my life miserable. He was the reason I wasn’t even sure who I was anymore. And now I was getting to control him.
I looked back to the man crumpled on the ground, and for a moment I worried he was now a pile of grape jelly. But as we got closer, another terror kicked in. His skin, from what I could tell in the overhead light shining on him from the building, was the right color, but ropes of fur seemed to have sprouted from his chest. I almost looked away, but then I realized what it was.
“CARL!” I shouted and ran forward, pulling Peter along with me. The monkey was lying on the unconscious man’s chest. “What are you doing?” I asked. But the monkey didn’t move. I reached my right hand out to them, my warm, human hand.
“Aaaapril—” Their voice came out of the watch, slow and then all at once, like ketchup. The monkey body didn’t move at all.
“Carl, what’s wrong?” I said, hearing the terror in my own voice.
“Bring me”—and then there was a long pause—“inside.”
Peter suddenly tried to jerk his hand out of mine, but there was no breaking free of that hand. Then I gave him a merciless squeeze and looked up at him and said, “You aren’t going anywhere.”
I wrapped my arm under the little body. It was warm but absolutely limp, like a dead thing.
Peter opened the door into the building. He didn’t even need to punch in his code—the door looked like it had been broken in with a battering ram. I let go of his hand once the door was closed behind us, and followed him around the receptionist’s desk and through a door into a hallway.
“What the . . .” Peter said. I peeked out from behind him and, well, I had to agree.
I grabbed Peter’s hand again, yanking him forward in a panic. “What is going on!?”
“APRIL!” Miranda and Maya yelled together.
I had to hold on to the monkey’s limp body and to Peter, but I was moving as fast as I could. Miranda’s face was bruised and scratched and bloody. One of her hands was inside of robot Carl’s massive fist. Maya too looked bad, completely disheveled, and there was a smear of what looked like blood on her neck.
“What the hell is going on?” I asked.
Maya and Miranda looked at each other, but before they could say anything, Carl’s voice came out of the little watch around the completely limp animal: “Put Peter in the other hand.”
At first I didn’t understand, but then I noticed the robot unclench its other fist. I walked Peter over to the robot and put his hand into the massive metal paw. Miranda recoiled a bit against Peter’s presence, even with Carl’s bulk between them.
I placed the monkey gently on the carpet and went to Miranda, wrapping my arms around her as carefully as I could.
“It’s so good to see you,” I said quietly beside her ear. Then I pulled back. “But what the fuck is going on?” I turned to Maya to inspect her. “Are you OK?”
“Yes,” Maya croaked. “I mean, no. Not really. Carl’s . . . brother. He took control of Miranda’s body and attacked me. He also took control of every person in that room.” She gestured behind us. “I had a little bit of footage, but”—she paused—“my phone was broken in the fight.”
“Fuck . . . FUCK!” I looked over at Peter, who had the audacity to be smiling just a little bit.
“Well, I have a phone, I can at least film the aftermath.”
“We can’t open that door,” Miranda said. “They’re probably standing there right now, waiting to pour in here and just kill us all.
“Then what do we have?”
“This was the plan?” Peter said.
I turned toward Peter, simultaneously sliding my phone out of my pocket and handing it, behind my back, to Maya. I intentionally stood in place, hoping beyond hope that Maya, partially blocked from Peter’s view, would know what to do w
ith it.
“You were going to show people that we have a few hundred people who voluntarily live inside of the Altus Space and farm AltaCoin for us? Yes, in the US, the labor laws wouldn’t allow that, but this is Val Verde. Companies exploit lax labor laws every day. And OK, even if I did technically put Miranda into the Space full-time without her knowledge, I’m not sure there’s even a law against that! She was an employee, and she agreed to take the high-security assignment.”
“It was kidnapping and you know it,” Maya said.
“Yeah, probably, if it was in the US, but good luck getting Val Verde’s government to prosecute me for anything. The US government already wants to shut me down, but they can’t. I’m here, all of our transactions are in our own currency. They can sanction the crap out of Val Verde, but we have everything we need here, and more than enough AltaCoin to buy whatever we don’t have. Any little mistakes we make, any details that you disagree with, they’re nothing. We’re pushing humanity to its next incarnation.
“Fuck ethics. Fuck morals. Altus is the future. Governments are over.”
He looked so little and unimportant, with his Caribbean tan and his business casual attire.
“But did you know?” Miranda asked.
“Did I know what?” he said, his voice heavy with disdain.
“That your technology wasn’t built by humans. And I’m not just talking about the changes Carl made to our brains so we could have the Dream. I know you know that. Did you know that an alien intelligence is moving those people around in there? That when I needed to go to the bathroom, some external, nonhuman intelligence is what moved my body for me?”
He was quiet for a long time, but then finally he said, “I don’t care how the technology works or where it comes from, I just care that it works.”
“So you did know,” I said.
“I didn’t ask questions. It worked, so we kept using it.”
“You didn’t build any of it, you don’t have any genius collaborators. You’re just doing what they tell you to do,” Maya said.
“How are you communicating with them? Do you know what they are?” I asked.
“We just got emails. It wasn’t a big deal. Eventually we figured out it wasn’t human, but when we asked, it said it was working against Carl. Carl was holding us back, it’s setting us free.”
People will believe whatever they need to, I guess.
“So you’re fine working with aliens as long as they make you feel special. Cool,” I said.
“I’ve had enough of this conversation.”
“Well, regardless,” Maya said, “it’s probably enough.” And then she stepped out from behind me, holding the phone in her hand.
“Should I send this to Andy now?”
ANDY
Stewart Patrick had done all he could to freak out investors, now focusing on Europe and the Middle East because they were awake. We had at least an hour before the East Coast would start waking up.
That’s when we needed to release whatever we had.
And what we had was good, just not great. It was audio of Peter saying that Altus had kidnapped someone against their will, and that they had human beings mining AltaCoin twenty-four hours a day. And we had Peter basically acknowledging that the Altus Space was alien technology.
That had to be good for something, right?
“None of this has been cheap to put together,” Stewart said over the phone from his office in the Financial District. “I’m taking a big risk here.”
“I think we all are. But I know that they have secrets that aren’t just, like, bad finances. They’re doing very illegal, very immoral shit.”
“That means nothing if you can’t amplify it. I know you’ve got a big audience, Andy, but if it’s just you, and no one else can confirm it, it’s not going to drive down the price of Altus. They’ve got access to the most important technology . . . maybe ever.”
“Stewart, you don’t have to tell me this, I know all of this. We have a plan, it’s going to go down. And it’s going to go down probably tomorrow morning.”
“Don’t give me probablys, Andy, I’ve got these people on edge, but they’re not going to sell unless things start to look very bad. They’ll sell fast when it does, but it has to look really bad, and they know the price we’ll buy at. If one of them sells, they all will, until we run out of money, at which point we’ll own more than 50 percent of Altus. But it has to go south hard and fast. Whatever this news is, it needs to happen soon.”
So I made Stewart Patrick that promise, and while I’m sure he was familiar with people who made promises they did not keep, I didn’t want to be one of those people, particularly if all humanity depended on it.
We were at a point from which the fire could spread. Conservative and liberal outlets both pulled stories from The Thread. Once it was in both of those places, the more middle-of-the-road publications would want a piece and Altus would be the lead story everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to CNN.
I logged into the chat to give One the good news. We had enough to go live with our video on Altus. Not only were we basically creating a nation with unelected leaders that we would have to live with forever, we could prove that those leaders were deeply corrupt and did not deserve the power they had amassed.
I found . . . that I didn’t have access to any public chats. I also didn’t have access to any private chats. Except one . . .
Twelve: I’ve lost access to the chat.
One: I know, I was worried about what you were about to say.
Twelve: What do you mean? I’ve got the goods. Peter Petrawicki on tape saying he kidnapped employees and also that, get this, Altus is a nonhuman project. It’s more than just the economic devastation and the inequality. They’re kinda monsters.
One: I don’t want to make this video anymore.
Twelve: Why not? It’s huge. The kind of power that Altus has consolidated is too much. We have to do this.
One: We don’t.
I was starting to panic. There was nothing I could do if One didn’t let me do it.
Twelve: This doesn’t make any sense. Let me take it to the rest of the chat and see what they think.
There was no pause before the words appeared on the screen.
One: Removing the Altus Space from the System will decrease our predictive power and influence considerably. Simulations with Altus are far clearer than simulations without it. The path to secure and stable intervention is much clearer and safer if Altus retains its power.
If my heart was beating at all in that moment, I would be surprised. It felt like it froze in my chest. And not just my heart . . . everything. The world had frozen solid.
Twelve: I don’t think I understand.
I did. I just wanted to hear it.
One: I’m here to take you to a stable future.
Twelve: But why not let us try? Isn’t there a higher chance that we could stay free if you helped us end Altus?
One: Yes, but I am not designed to help you stay free. That opportunity passed.
And then, since I couldn’t think of anything else to say . . .
Twelve: Why? Why would you tell me who you are?
One: Because I need to tell you, your life will be so much better and so much simpler if you do not fight this. Not just human life, your life. You love Altus, you don’t want to destroy it. If you do, you’ll lose everything, and simulations show a clearer outcome if you know that.
Twelve: But I could tell everyone? I could tell everyone what you are.
One: Yes, you can.
YOU HAVE BEEN BANNED FROM THE CHAT
“JASON!” I called. “BEX!” They ran into my room.
“The Thread,” I said. “They won’t publish the video.”
“Why not?”
“Because The Thread is the thing that is trying to end us. The Thread was started by Carl’s fucking B
ROTHER or whatever! It’s running simulations, and it’s predicted that keeping Altus alive is better for the predictive power of their model. And, apparently, telling me the truth is also better for that, so I have no idea what the fuck to do with that information. Fuck!”
“Have you told April?” Jason asked.
“Not yet, I called you guys in here first thing.”
“Why don’t you just publish a video yourself?” Bex asked.
“I mean, that’s what I’ll have to do, but I don’t have the credibility of The Thread. Miranda is my friend, April is my friend. I’ve set myself up to be an Altus fan, but that was always secondary to being able to feed information to The Thread. If I come out and say Altus is bad, and then The Thread makes a video about how all of this is an overreaction twenty minutes later, we’re fucked. It’s just another thing to argue about.”
“There has to be a way,” Jason mused.
“One didn’t seem to think so . . .” I said, despondent.
“One is trying to make you feel the way they need you to feel!” Bex pushed.
“You’re right. OK.” I called April . . . It rang a bunch before going to voicemail.
I hung up and then my phone rang.
“April!” I said. “Is everything OK?”
