addiction isn’t necessarily about the specific thing; it’s about mental reliance, it’s a bug in your brain software
CHAPTER ONE
And that was a job at a doomed startup funded by the endless well of rich people who can only dream the most boring dream a rich person can dream: being even more rich. Of course, working at a startup means that you’re part of the “family,” and so when things go wrong, or when deadlines fly past, or when an investor has a hissy fit, or just because, you don’t get out of work until three in the morning.
That doesn’t make those things unwonderful or not unique… It’s just that there are a lot of people doing a lot of amazing things, so eventually you get a little jaded.
And then I. Felt. Like. The. Biggest. Jerk.
I mean, I’m an artist working way too hard at a deeply uninteresting job to pay way too much in rent so I can stay in this place—so that I can remain immersed in one of the most creative and influential cultures on earth. Here in the middle of the sidewalk is a piece of art that was a massive undertaking, an installation that the artist worked on, possibly for years, to make people stop and look and consider. And here I am, hardened by big-city life and mentally drained by hours of pixel pushing, not even giving something so magnificent a second glance.
“Look, guys,” he said, “it’s easy to make something cool look cool, that’s why everyone picks cool things. Ultimately, though, cool is always going to be boring. What if we can make something dumb look amazing? Something unmarketable, awesome? That’s a real challenge. That takes real skill. Let’s show real skill.”
To me it just seemed like that incurable ailment so many well-off dudes have, believing despite mountains of evidence that what the world truly needs is another white guy comedy podcast.
“What the absolute fuck…” He was wearing a backpack and three camera straps and holding two tripods.
CHAPTER THREE
“God, I hope you don’t feel like you have to represent all black people with me,” I said. “I hope you’re not, like, careful all the time.”
This is everything that isn’t conjecture. Carl didn’t just show up in New York, there’s one in pretty much every city on Earth. There are at least sixty Carls, photos of Carls are popping up everywhere from Beijing to Buenos Aires.
Everyone is calling them “Carls” because they didn’t have anything else to call them.
I want to be very clear that whatever hangups I have are 100 percent mine. I had a very happy childhood; I just wasn’t a very happy child. My parents have always been supportive and without expectations, which is pretty much all a kid can ask for.
CHAPTER FOUR
But in those manic moments when I thought I could be some kind of vessel for truth, I’d thought about what I’d say if I someday got a soapbox. That income inequality is out of hand. That all people are pretty damn similar so it would be great if we stopped hating each other. That prison sentences for nonviolent crimes are dumb and that drug addiction is a health problem, not a crime problem.
Andy’s dad called me after that interview to give me some media relations tips, which, thank god. He literally wanted me to take a class, but I caught on pretty quick. The real trick is to know exactly the one point you absolutely 100 percent need to get across and also know when to shut your mouth. My biggest problem was always the second bit. I always finished really strong and then would say, “uh,” like I had more to say, but really I didn’t. Listening back, I hate hearing that “uh” so much. It makes me want to smack my idiot face.
They tell you that power corrupts… They never tell you how quickly!
CHAPTER FIVE
“No, I… I don’t know, April! It’s exciting, but space aliens are a very specific explanation for a very broad circumstance. There’s more to the universe than humans and aliens. Maybe they’re made by humans but sent from the future. Maybe they are a kind of projection through spacetime. Maybe they’re proof that our universe is a simulation and someone is changing the code. Mostly, I don’t pretend an explanation is correct just because I haven’t thought of any others that fit with current data.”
“No one ever looks at the citations, don’t worry. Sometimes you just need a fresh pair of eyes.”
CHAPTER SIX
If they are talking to you, it’s because you can make them money.
They’re all assholes, but if you get lucky, you might find one who’s your asshole.
It was not lost on me that she’d already switched from “you” to “we.”
They have no incentive to tell you the dirty truth, which Mr. Skampt attempted to tell me then.
“April, this is a huge decision. Becoming involved with something like this… it’s going to completely take over. People will hate you for no reason, or for bad reasons, or even for good reasons. People are torn apart by fame, and this is far beyond what most of them deal with. You’re talking about yourself like you’re a tool, but you’re a person too. And an evolving one. This will affect your life forever.”
And if not that, then . . . “Oh, by the way, my girlfriend’s bi too, maybe we can [MEANINGFUL PAUSE] hang out some time.”
“So you officially have an employee. They make your life easier, but only if you use them. If you are not telling him to get you coffee at least once per day, he will literally feel offended. He is there for you, you need him, and he wants to help.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
They knew me well enough that they wouldn’t push for the story. They knew what had happened. Not the details, but that I’d cut a string if I ever felt it holding me back. They didn’t like it, but they weren’t going to fix it.
Of course, I was pulling this all straight out of my ass. I didn’t know if the Carls were dangerous or if my mind was being controlled. Who cared as long as my made-up shit wasn’t as poisonous as Peter Petrawicki’s made-up shit.
In the end, my brand was me, so whatever I said became something I believed.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Carls had become more than my life; they were my identity. I used to be good at TV because I didn’t care and that irreverence was something people enjoyed. Now I had to be good because I did care.
And that’s what I try to take away from this period. Whatever I did, I did it because I cared. I believed Carl was a force for good in the world, and humanity’s opinion of Carl mattered because I came to honestly believe that the Carls were here to judge us. It didn’t even matter if I was right, because that was the world I wanted to live in; that was the world that made sense to me. And even if I was wrong, I believed the world would be better off if we just acted as if I was right.
“Robin, is ghostwriting really OK?” I asked with a mouthful of pizza. I had gotten extremely comfortable with Robin.
“It’s standard industry practice,” he said, looking a little uncomfortable.
She nodded at me. “Now, I just like it, and the people are amazing, and from all over the world with different ideas and worldviews, all working together toward a common goal. It’s a pretty beautiful thing. In fact, you all should spend a little time in the Dream. Just look up one of the solved sequences on Wikipedia and go through it. It might give you a better appreciation for the Carls. I know it has for me.”
The Dream, this creation of the Carls, it had been there for me to enjoy and I’d been ignoring it because I didn’t feel like I was going to get anything useful done. So what, though? It was marvelous. Just working through what other people had done gave me a feeling that this was all actually worth it. When you get stuck fighting small battles, it makes you small.
@AprilMaybeNot: “My Life with Carl: A Memoir and Manifesto” is in stores now! But who are we kidding, you’re ordering it on Amazon just like me because we care more about saving two dollars than the continued prosperity of our country!
“I’m getting used to it,” I lied. The only thing I was getting used to was pretending like I was getting used to it. Since I knew Maya knew I was lying, and she knew I knew she knew, we just gave it a pass.
“First, anything unusual. You need to spend the next few hours and maybe the next few days learning everything you can about airplanes. Try to figure out what kind this is in your first go. Is it a Boeing? An Airbus? A CRJ? You can start broad and narrow it down doing research between sleeps. You might just have a sensation that something is a little off. Dream clues are often omissions, things that aren’t there that should be, but you might not be able to spot them if you don’t know what the plane’s cockpit is supposed to look like.
“Second, any broken repetition. Usually repeating units in the Dream are identical, so anything that makes one thing different from others of the same type is probably important. If one of the seats isn’t in its full, upright, and locked position, or one of the windows is single-paned, or one of the bathrooms smells weird. It could be anything.
“Third, don’t try to do this on your own. Talk to me. I’ll get together a few people I trust who might have relevant knowledge. I know that it can be really appealing to you to win independently, but there haven’t been any puzzle sequences solved by a lone Dreamer for over a month now. These things are complicated, and it’s clear to me that the Carls want us to be working together. Find what you can find and report back to me. I know what I’m doing.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Governments were accused of hiding things because people just couldn’t accept that those in power were exactly as lost as the rest of us. Human beings are terrible at accepting uncertainty, so when we’re ignorant, we make assumptions based on how we imagine the world. And our guess is so obviously correct that other guesses seem, at best, willful ignorance—at worst, an attack.
The vast majority of those people nod appreciatively and then change the channel and watch NCIS and eat the tacos that they made. It’s their own recipe. They’ve developed it over years, and they like it better than any taco you could get at even a super fancy restaurant. They go to bed at 10:30 and worry a bit about whether their son is adjusting well to college.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I looked down at the hand again and noticed for the first time something gray and dull in among the silver and black. Wedged between two of the armor plates was a jagged piece of something. I reached in and pulled it out: a shard of metal, a fragment of a bullet. I held it in my hand, cold and innocuous as a penny.
The hand bowed. I mean, maybe. It flattened itself against the floor a bit and then stood back up.
“One tap for yes, two taps for no. Can you understand me?” Two taps.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I realized I hadn’t cried yet. That was messed up. I thought about just crying right then—it would have been easy, just relaxing a mental muscle and I would have been gushing. But then I thought (for real), Nah, April, save it for the camera.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Interestingly, that is another thing we’re not supposed to talk about. If I say you are, and then you aren’t, you could sue me.”
“Oh. Well…” I thought for a second. “If a person were in your ambulance with exactly my symptoms, would you be concerned about their future ability to be alive?”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The president was wearing a blue blazer and white silk blouse. Her gray hair swept over her shoulders casually.
It was intensely surreal. There was a bit of that “Oh my god, they’ve got three dimensions and a size and a shape and I’m seeing a person with my own eyes that I have previously only seen through the eyes of cameras” feeling that you get with any famous person. That’s a weird thing, and it’s a very interesting and complex experience.
“April, Martin Bellacourt’s bones and organs and blood—everything except his skin—are now, as far as our best people can tell at the moment, grape jelly.”
“Oh, April, of all people I thought you would know what this is like. But I understand. The charisma of office, they call it. It’s hard to see past it. Indeed, I work to cultivate it. It’s part of the job.”
“I’m doing a number of things in the city.” She meant New York. “Because it’s where you were attacked, it makes more sense for me to be doing events here.” Then, without even pausing for breath, she changed the subject. “April, I’m going to debrief you personally. This would normally be done by someone else, but since we have a little time and I used to be in intelligence, I’m happy to do it myself.”
They babbled on about Tom’s honeymoon and their weirdo neighbors and did everything they could to make it feel like a normal parent-kid chat. You know what they didn’t do, though? They didn’t, not one single time, say, “What were you thinking?!” Not because they knew or because they understood—I really don’t think they did. They didn’t ask that because I sure as hell didn’t stab myself in the back, and when a radical extremist stabs someone in the back, the only person at fault is the radical extremist.
“No, those are certainly on the list. But after this news comes out, the first thing the world will think when they look at you is why did Carl save you and not the hundreds of other people who died yesterday.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Basically, I wasn’t really needed. But addiction isn’t necessarily about the specific thing; it’s about mental reliance, it’s a bug in your brain software, and even with the support of some truly remarkable people working to keep me in line, I never went cold turkey. Even after the apps were off my phone, I would go to twitter.com using its browser.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I struggled to rephrase the question. “Humanity, what do you think of us?” “Beautiful,” Carl replied. We sat inside of that moment for a very long time. I thought maybe he would say more, but he didn’t.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“Fame, after all, is but the sum of all the misunderstandings which gather about a new name.”