by Hank Green
Every day we come in and we do science. We do great science, and I actually feel like the leader of this little team. I feel like I belong to something again. We do it right, and we do it well, and in the morning I come in and I look at my little bent, mangled piece of hard drive and feel something lovely. I feel whatever feeling is the exact opposite of regret.
MAYA
You don’t get to know where April and I went. I’ve had enough of that. We’re just here on planet Earth with the rest of the humans. Did we make a couple of not-super-well-thought-out financial decisions? Yeah, but we had to make a comfortable life for ourselves and Paulette. Paulette is our monkey.
* * *
—
We did buy a house together. In general, I would suggest not having a very large, shared asset with a girlfriend who has not always been the most stable person in your life. But, I don’t know, it felt a little like she had changed. Or maybe that’s just my April-shaped blind spot. I think part of the point of loving someone is being able to deal with their brokenness.
April’s family was on the West Coast and mine was on the East, so we compromised and we live, well, somewhere in the middle. I am going to save the memory of our shared reunion with our families for myself. It was the first time my parents met April’s parents, and it was so normal that it could never feel as important as it was. It was not as big of a deal as saving the world, but it was close.
Mostly, though, it was just the two of us.
Time passed, and eventually, finally, it became clear that Tater was moving past its prime. We knew, down there somewhere, in the darkness, there were treasures waiting for us. One morning, I declared it was time. April and I sank our hands into the pot together, feeling the little magically formed nuggets of food there. Our hands met under the soil, and we laughed together.
And then April shouted with joy, “PAULETTE!” The monkey had popped one of the dirty taters straight into her mouth and was crunching it. We all laughed together. Except for Paulette, who didn’t like the flavor of uncooked potato and spat it out onto the ground.
April’s hands dug deeper into the pot to see if there were any other prizes to be found, and I just watched her. Her body, both new parts and old, working together to generate the tiny effort needed to push into the loose soil. She was beautiful. She had always been beautiful. Too beautiful for her own good, but now she was a literal technological marvel as well. I love to watch her body. Her hand came out of the bucket holding something that was not a potato. With a look of complete, abject amazement on her face, she held up a swollen and muddy book.
She pushed it toward me, and I, on instinct, pushed it back. Honestly, I was a little terrified of what it might mean.
“The Book of Good Times,” it said on the cover.
I moved over to kneel next to her so that I could see the words as she read them out loud.
Hey, you two. I hope you get this. If you do, then things will have gone as well as could be expected. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you more, but if you had known, you might not have succeeded. I’ve run a couple simulations, though, and in all of them you forgave me at the end, so that is bittersweet. I’m sorry I’m going to leave you.
I was never going to survive long anyway.
I’m even sorrier about the pain I have caused. It has ripped at me to be the source of such conflict and division. I set that plan in motion before I cared about people as individuals. It was cruel of my parents to deprive me of that care and then give it to me after there was nothing I could do to change my plans. But I suppose they did that for a reason.
I just want you to know that you people are wonderful and beautiful and terrible and foolish. I was given knowledge of the action of other agents like myself and of the different kinds of people they worked with. Maybe it’s reality or my own familiarity with you in particular or just my programming, but it seems clear to me, you are something special.
I loved to watch you. I loved to learn about you. I loved loving you.
You’re radically collaborative, profoundly empathetic, and deeply communal. Everyone who tells you anything different is selling the fear that is the only thing that can break that nature. They do that because it turns people into devices. My only advice: Never do that to another person, and do not let anyone do it to you.
Oh, and also, as a general rule, err on the side of caution and . . .
She looked up at me and then kept reading:
. . . listen to Maya.
In this book are a couple of explanations of how I work for you to put in an eventual book that you will make available. It will be a memoir of our experiences in this time, and I would like to tell people more about me. I think it will be good for people to know what happened here, how I came to you, and telling the ones who will listen about my brother will further push you toward a more stable path. I hope you don’t mind me saying so, but for you, knowing someone is watching does generally improve human behavior.
I don’t think we could have written this book if Carl hadn’t said we would. But it was their last request, so we didn’t have much choice.
I can’t tell you if you’ll remain free. I can only tell you that you’ve got better odds now than you did before. I was very powerful, and losing that power has been very hard. Literally painful, sometimes, but other times simply the knowledge of my own diminishment in the face of the greater power that now inhabits your planet was devastating. But my power was real, and while I am angry at the loss, I do believe that my parents did know at least something about what they were doing. I believe that because I have witnessed my own power and compassion, and I assume that theirs is even greater.
If you’ll allow me one final trick, Maya, you two should probably go to Costco. Around fifty people will be coming over for dinner tonight.
And so they did. Andy and Bex and Jason and Robin and Miranda all showed up, but so did a few familiar faces I didn’t expect. My parents, for starters, and April’s. But also Saanvi Laghari, the woman who I interviewed about the dead dolphins, the two pilots who flew us to and from Altus, and Jessica and Mitty, our ambulance drivers. There were people we didn’t know too, like Miranda’s advisor, Dr. Lundgren, and a bunch of people none of us had ever met.
And every person there brought with them a small, simple leather-bound book. These were the people who Carl had chosen. They were the people Carl needed to make the plan work.
They were business owners and servers and nurses and drivers and teachers, and we connected with old friends and made new ones. It was Carl’s last gift, and we drank of it deeply. We were awake until morning, laughing and talking about what we’d done and where we were going, and nothing seemed too heavy to carry because all of these people could share the burden. But we also just talked about our friends and our hopes and our scars. And the soundtrack, of course, was perfect.
APRIL
This isn’t another cliff-hanger, I promise. I’m done here. There’s no more story left after these last pages that is in any way interesting. You want to know what a day in the life of April May is? I don’t really care. You’re convinced that I’m using my superpowers to affect the world in fiendish and clever ways? Well, I haven’t been able to download information into my brain since Carl died, so that’s not happening. You want advice for how to live in the twenty-first century and not have humanity taken over by a sinister force that, as you read this, lives on inside your very cells, deciding every moment whether or not we are past saving? I also would love to have that guidance. Unfortunately, I do not have it to give.
That’s the whole reason I wrote these books. That’s why I wrangled my friends, racked my augmented brain, and suffered through the telling. Even in a world without Altus, the most sophisticated software in existence is tasked with figuring out how to keep you from leaving a website. That software knows all of your weaknesses, and while it’s only concentrat
ing on individuals, exploiting individual weakness is also exploiting societal weakness. What that software wants to do is make us into people who are easier to predict.
These algorithms are already programming society. And the question that we now have to ask is, what happens when they realize it? What happens when one person, or a small group of people, motivated primarily by the need to get their stock price to go up, realize that they have the power to program a society?
What happens thirty or fifty years from now when the people who were inspired by the promise of the internet are all washed up or retired or dead? What happens when the stock prices stagnate and those companies need to demonstrate their worth to investors? What does a single CEO with the power to remake the world do?
Do they help us overcome climate change? Do they help us progress toward a more just and stable society? Or do they just make money?
Of course, I don’t know if we’ll be saved. I don’t know if we’ll get to keep going on our own path. And that’s the kinda sickening thing—we’ll never know. We didn’t kill Carl’s brother; we just convinced him he wasn’t needed. He’s still here, watching, calculating, learning, and ready, at any moment, to lead us carefully, subtly, secretly, and brutally into submission.
And how do we avoid it? It might be that saving the world is idiotically simple. Maybe we just need to connect and care for one another. But I don’t know. Of course I don’t know. When it comes down to it, when has humanity ever known what it was doing?
I was asked to become more than human, and I welcomed it. I wanted to be important. I wanted to be exceptional. But now my exceptionality is written on my face, and I cannot leave it behind.
The fucked-up thing is, when I look back at this, I may not have gotten what I deserved, but I got exactly what I wanted.
* * *
—
Almost six months after Altus went down, when the world had mostly recovered from the anger and division that the loss had caused, and the economy finally seemed interested in some kind of positive movement, I woke up in my bed after having fallen asleep in Maya’s arms the same way I had dozens of times in those months.
“April,” Maya said softly in my ear, “this is going to be scary. But it’s not something to be scared about.”
I was, of course, instantly anxious, but maybe out of a subconscious understanding of the situation, I didn’t stir.
“Carl told me this would happen months ago. Just before we left for Val Verde, he said that, if we made it through, eventually . . .” And then she trailed off.
I tried to shift, but my body felt wrong.
“Your arm and your legs, they are not actually permanently fused to you. You can take them off and put them back on. Last night, while you were sleeping, they came off.”
I did panic a little bit then. I tried to lift my left arm, but it was not there. Instead, from my shoulder, a scarred and rippling stump stood out. I took my right arm to feel around my body, foreign and empty and small.
“Oh my god,” I said. I drew back the sheet to look down at my body, soft and broken and made only of human stuff.
“My face . . .” I said, feeling it with my right hand.
“Carl said it can’t come off, it’s connected to your brain.”
“So.” I paused. “It will always be in me.”
She crawled into the bed, and her arms and legs wrapped around me. I felt the prickle of her leg hairs on my skin. “Yeah, it will always be in you,” she said, but she didn’t sound upset about it, just informative.
I didn’t cry because I was angry or scared or sad, though I was all of those things. I cried because it was just a lot. I might have also even been, in that moment, happy.
For so long I had believed what I had been told, that I was a tool, formed and sharpened and wielded for the world. Not a person, but an agent of change, a cultural mutagen, a weapon. I heard my breathing, coming fast and shallow.
“It’s real,” I said, because, somehow, what we had done hadn’t felt real until then. I hadn’t felt real. I had lost myself, not when I woke up in that bar, but two years ago when I woke up to a cup of coffee and a dozen text messages and this same face looking down at me. I felt my story finally slide into place. “It’s real,” I said again.
“It is,” she said, and she pulled me into her. “Your life is written on this body, and I love every piece of it.”
Somehow she made me feel human, and that is, I’ve learned, one of the very best things to be.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Oh gosh, I don’t even know how to start. This book felt, at times, entirely impossible, but a lot of people made it possible. I’ll start with my son, Orin, who reminded me to take frequent breaks by pointing to my computer and saying, “Close it.” But, also, I’m extremely grateful to my wife, Katherine, who (through a combination of love and also a desire for the sequel to come out) dealt with me while I was having . . . dramatic moments with this project.
Maya Ziv is my editor, and she is very good at communicating that something can be great while also needing a great deal of work. She is responsible for many good things that are in this book, but even more bad things that aren’t. And both Maya and I are in awe of Mary Beth Constant, our tremendous copy editor who saved our butts dozens of times. Jodi Reamer, my literary agent, has also been there every step of the way and seems incapable of not being a tremendous voice of support. Maja Nikolc and the foreign rights team at Writers House have also done an amazing job of helping my work reach new countries and be published in more than a dozen languages, which is a dream come true. So many people at Dutton helped this come together. Kaitlin Kall’s cover design, Tiffany Estreicher’s book design, proofreading from Eileen Chetti, Alice Dalrymple, and Rob Sternitzky, the marketing and publicity teams, especially Amanda Walker and Emily Canders, and so many others. It is really wonderful to know how many people it takes to bring a book into the world. Thank you to everyone at Dutton for getting books into the hands of readers.
I had so many early readers helping me understand the nuances of writing characters who are very different from me. I consider those people my editors as well and I learned a tremendous amount from them. Those people include Gaby Dunn, Ashley Ford, Taylor Behnke, and Phyllida Swift. Also, I have to say, it seems so unlikely that I would find a trained editor who is Chinese Trinidadian, but Danielle Goodman is exactly that!
Thank you to Lindsay Ellis, who gave me so many amazing ideas and perspectives on an early draft of this book.
Gabriela Elena and Ketie Saner created a timeline of An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, which came in handy a dozen times while writing this book, so much so that I hired them to help me construct the timeline of this book, and their help was invaluable.
There are also people who had no idea they were helping, like Harvey Sugiuchi, who was a student of a friend of mine and, when she asked her class what magical item they wish they had, he said, “I want a book of good times that can take me to the best place to relax and have fun at any given moment. It also has stuff like recipes in it.”
Thank you also to every person who advocates for a book . . . who gets on that book’s team and pushes for it. There is so much great work out there, and for some reason, sometimes we need our arms twisted to indulge in it. So, whether you’re a bookseller, a librarian, or just that pesky friend, thank you for twisting those arms!
If you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably aware, but if you’re not, my life has been bizarre and extremely fortunate. A huge part of that is the community of people who find entertainment and identity and connection in the content my brother and I make on YouTube. Those people have enabled so many good and cool things to happen, and this book is one more of those things. I never stop being grateful for the insight and opportunity that community has given me.
And lastly, let’s go with my brother, John, who is a near-perfect collaborator
and advisor. Yes, he gave me notes on this book, but more than that, we have given each other notes on just about every decision either of us has made in the past fifteen years, and we are both way better off because of it. He and my parents and my wife and my son and, honestly, my whole family were the greatest stroke of luck I have ever received, and I’ve gotten some doozies.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hank Green is the number one New York Times bestselling author of An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. He’s also the CEO of Complexly, a production company that creates educational content, including Crash Course and SciShow, prompting The Washington Post to name him “one of America’s most popular science teachers.” Complexly’s videos have been viewed more than two billion times on YouTube. Hank and his brother, John, are also raising money to dramatically and systematically improve maternal health care in Sierra Leone, where, if trends continue, one in seventeen women will die in childbirth. You can join them at PIH.org/hankandjohn.
PERMISSIONS
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