We all dropped our Altus nicknames when we got back to Berkeley. And I say “we” because the first people I hired onto my research team (yes, I had a research team now) were Paxton and Sid.

I was trying to get them to go for runs with me, though they were more successful in getting me to play D&D with them.

But I did succeed in getting them to help me do amazing research. We teased out the barest bits of how the Altus Space worked. From that, we got little insights that could potentially help push brain-computer interfaces forward by ten or even fifteen years.

And then, after we were fairly certain that we’d gotten most of the low-hanging fruit from our analysis of the alien code, y’know what we did? We destroyed it. We took every single hard drive that had ever touched that stuff, and we put them in a truck, and we drove that truck to a facility that can smash anything into powder. And then each of us took turns throwing drives into the maw of this giant grinder that was built specifically to destroy hard drives. The drives split and bounced and ripped apart until they finally fell through to the other side, where they were nothing more than jangling pieces of plastic, silicon, and metal. We each took one little piece back to the lab with us, where they sit above our lab stations.

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.