If you ever want someone to talk to who is familiar with stuff like this, or just to bounce ideas off of, I wanted to make myself available.

Andy

A response came within the hour.

Subject: Re: I Like Your Content

Andy,

I appreciate you reaching out. I am going to tell you a secret now, and I will be very disappointed if you share it.

I do not work on The Thread alone. We are a consortium of anonymous experts. I think that your expertise would be extremely valuable to the conversation, but membership in The Thread is not taken lightly. We are a group of people dedicated to changing society fundamentally. The YouTube channel is only the beginning of that. We have a large endowment and the support of some of the most powerful individuals in the world. We are here to shape the stories that humanity will tell about itself in the future, and we would like you to join us.

If you would be interested in that, there are a few things you need to know:

1. Any attempt to uncover anyone’s identity—even asking simple personal questions about age, location, or marital status—will result in a permanent ban from the channel.

2. All chats in The Thread, private or not, are viewable by me.

3. You will be introduced by your expertise, and no other information will be shared about you. If you share personal information about yourself, you will be banned.

4. All members are vetted by me.

5. I make all final decisions regarding content, membership, banning, and strategy.

6. We go by numbers, not names. I am One because I started and fund The Thread. You, if you joined, would be Twelve.

7. We assess membership rates based on net worth. If you have a net worth under the national average, we pay you $50,000 per year. If your net worth is over the national average, you pay us $1 for every $100 above the national average. So if your net worth is $1,000,000, that’s $850,000 more than the national average. So you would pay us $8,500 per year.

We have a great deal more work to do, and I think you would be an extremely valuable addition to our team, but I understand if you aren’t interested.

Thank you for your kind words,

One

Well, that was something. The fact that something so secretive could be a group of people was really counterintuitive. Eleven people all sharing the responsibility? That was intense, but it made a lot of sense as well. The videos were just too good for one person to make, there had to be a budget. But it was the “most powerful individuals in the world” line that really got my heart thumping.

If I really wanted to make a difference in ways I felt my identity wouldn’t allow, this was it! There was a problem, though. If we were really going to go off my new net worth, which was now up over $100 million, it was a lot to ask. I figured the best policy was honesty, so I replied.

One,

Thank you for your quick response. I am fascinated by this. I have two questions.

1. How do you know that I won’t share this information?

2. My net worth has recently increased dramatically, and the amount I would pay you under your scheme would be over a million dollars. I don’t know how to pay someone that much money. And also, it feels wrong to spend so much money to be part of something even this cool.

I also need to weigh my existing obligations. But overall it just seems like a lot of money. Does it make sense for me to pay that much?

Andy

The response was almost immediate.

Andy,

1. I don’t think you would share the information because you aren’t a dick.

2. Membership rates are nonnegotiable. I’ll work with you on transferring the money if you wish to join.

Thank you,

One

Well, I guess that was that, then. I wasn’t going to transfer a million bucks to an anonymous rando, even if he was a very cool anonymous rando, without a lot of thought, so I decided to do something that the book had told me to do.

I’d been putting it off since even before the book, actually.

I think that tragedy either brings people together or drives them apart. You can find either comfort or a constant reminder. April had always been the reason Maya and I were friends, and so once she was gone, we floated apart immediately. Calling her kinda scared me. I thought maybe she didn’t care that much about me, or maybe she thought that I didn’t care that much about her. But I had been thinking about her, so was glad the book made me pick up the phone.

“What have you been up to?” I asked after the main pleasantries were done.

“I still spend a lot of time on the Som.” It was an answer, but it seemed intentionally vague. Like answering the question in a way that also changed the subject. She was always good at that. I let her be good at it this time.

“Do they talk at all about The Thread?” I asked her, since it was on my mind and also the Som was good at teasing out secrets.

“Ohhh, yeah. Very yeah. Some people think it’s April, but that’s bullshit. The Thread is way too smart to be April.”

I laughed. Every corner of the internet had a different theory about who The Thread was. I had gone Occam’s razor and assumed that it was just one person, but now I knew it really was a conspiracy! It made sense that the Som was mixing Thread conspiracies with April conspiracies. The Som was conspiracy central.

“Sorry, did that sound mean?” she asked.

“No, I was laughing because it’s true and also because it’s a completely ludicrous idea that The Thread is April.”

“Yeah,” she said. I wasn’t sure what to say, but then she continued. “I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch, Andy. I’m still really sad.”

I almost hung up the phone because I knew I was going to start crying. It took a huge amount of willpower to just stay on the phone and let her hear me lose it a bit.

“It’s OK, Andy. I know it’s hard,” she said. She wasn’t crying, which made me feel like I was being weak.

“I don’t think she’s dead,” I blurted out.

“Finally,” Maya replied matter-of-factly. She had seemed depressed to me in recent group chats, but now she seemed solid and confident, if anxious.

“What?”

“I mean, of course she’s not dead. People are just moving on because that’s the logical thing to do. What else can you do? But she’s not dead. I’ve been saying it the whole time and everyone just looks at me with pity. I don’t know what she is, Andy, but she’s not dead.”

“Will we find her?” I asked. She seemed so certain that April was alive. I had gotten jolts of that hope from the book, but I wanted more of it.

There was tension in Maya’s voice when she responded, and it felt like she was answering a different question than the one I was asking: “Wherever she is, I know that I’ll never forgive myself. I might not ever forgive her. She was an idiot and she ruined everything.”

“Jeez, Maya.”

“I’m just saying it out loud. We’ve all thought it. What would you say to her if you had the chance?”

“Oh god, I don’t know. ‘Where have you been? What are the Carls?’ ”

“That’s what you’d ask her … What do you want to tell her?”

“Oh, that I’m sorry and I love her and we need her back and the world is falling apart without her and that she was an idiot a bunch of times, but that doesn’t means she’s a bad person,” I said.