He received the warning but blew right past it anyway. “People who were deeply involved with sequence solving, their minds rely on it very much like a drug. And when it’s not there anymore, at least according to a lot of smart people, the mind keeps looking for it, and it can be a really difficult withdrawal.”

“Dad, I’m fine.”

“None of us expect you to be fine, Maya,” he said, his voice a physical thing, strong enough to lean on. “But, listen, it’s also fine for me to worry. What the Carls did to our minds, no one understands it, and it seems like a lot of people are finding patterns where they don’t exist now. You need to have something else to focus on. When are you going back to work?”

“Gill,” my mom started, but I raised my hand to quiet her.

My dad knew how the world worked, and he’d worked very hard to get that knowledge. There aren’t a lot of Black investment bankers, and that’s not because they’re uninterested in the profession. He fought his whole life to succeed in a hostile system. As far back as I can remember, he told me the world didn’t want people who looked like us to be rich, but that it was our job to get rich anyway.

My mom has usually been happy to push me in whatever direction I was facing. My dad, on the other hand, thought that my best chances for happiness were more specific. He wanted a clear career track. He wanted me, his only child, to care about the money that he’d made for me. He wanted me to pass it to my kids, which is the only reason me coming out was ever weird in the house. Dad wanted to know what my sexuality meant for the next generation. He was at least cool enough to not say it out loud, but we could all tell, and eventually we had to have a conversation about all of the various options I had if I ever chose to have kids. When I was seventeen. Dad had been fine with me leaving my work to be part of April’s projects, and help Miranda build the Som, but now I was his worst nightmare: another rich kid with an art school degree and no direction.

“I understand, Dad, I know I’ve not been great these past few months. But April isn’t dead and I’m not going to keep pretending that she is. I’ve got to do this.”

My dad looked at my mom with hard eyes. She looked down at the table. They thought she was dead. Of course they did—everyone thought she was dead.

“You know what?” I said quietly. And then I pushed my bottom lip onto my teeth to start making a f sound, but then I stopped myself. I didn’t say it, but they both heard that “fuck you” hanging there in our dining room. We do not curse in my house.

“Maya …” my mom said as my dad’s eyes widened. I don’t yell, not at people. I yell at the TV when some senator is being racist. I yell at Photoshop when it crashes. I don’t yell at people. I least of all yell at my parents.

I yelled at them. “She’s Not Dead!” My hand, unbidden, slammed on the table as I stood up … all of the silverware clinking in the dishes.

“Maya! Don’t you speak to your mother like that,” my dad said, firm and cold from his chair on the other side of the table.

I leaned over the table toward him. “I’m going to go find April,” I said. I almost whispered it. And then I turned around and walked out of the dining room.

And then, because I will never not be completely horrified by myself losing control, I turned around and said, “Call me tomorrow when we’re all less mad. I’ll be in New Jersey.”

On the way out, I noticed the pot of soil with those newly buried, dirty, cut-up potatoes hiding in it. I let out a sigh and grabbed it as I went out the door.

Andy Skampt

@AndySkampt

Peak Post-Carl Mood: Completely unsure of what humanity even is anymore but absolutely positive that dogs are very very good.

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ANDY

It seems unlikely that my best friend becoming an international superstar for being the discoverer and chief human advocate for an extraterrestrial life-form isn’t the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me. But the actual weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me started like this:

Five months after my best friend was murdered by terrorists just after solving a riddle that resulted in the apparent disappearance of aliens from our planet, someone knocked twice on my door, and then I got a text message from my dead friend.

Knock Knock, it said.

This isn’t even the weird part. After staring at that text message for way too long, I dashed to my door and flung it open to find a brown clothbound book sitting in the hall of my building. Words were pressed into the hard cover in a simple serif font, filled with gold leaf: “The Book of Good Times.”

OK, actually, I need to go further back.

It’s easy to forget how quiet the world was in the months after Carl (or the Carls, depending on who you believed) vanished. Each of the sixty-four Carls that had appeared in cities across the world blinked out of existence at the exact same moment except for one. The Carl in Manhattan did not simply vanish; it yanked itself into the air at (a peer-reviewed paper estimated) around Mach 3. This added weight to the theory that there was only ever one Carl; they just somehow projected one statue into sixty-four different locations simultaneously. Look, I don’t pretend to understand any of this, which sets me blissfully apart from all of the bloviation that occurred on cable news in the aftermath.

But bloviation though there was, the world actually chilled way down for a bit after the Carls vanished. This tremendous force that had thrown a wrench into our collective understanding of the universe and slapped every person on a spectrum somewhere between “We welcome our robot overlords” and “If we do not fight, we will die” just … disappeared.

Like, imagine what would happen to the gun control debate if every gun just fwipped out of existence along with the knowledge of … what guns are or how to make them. The thing we were all so mad at each other over was just gone.

That’s not to say that people were OK. The economy kept contracting, and no one was really sure why. People were just working less, or dropping out of the labor force entirely. There was a lot of going through the motions, but the reality was, everything felt a little empty. The Carl debate was an identity-defining conversation for hundreds of millions of people, and that identity was now gone.

Before Carl, the world was changing fast, and many people had already lost their solid grip on how they fit into the world, but most folks were still in a story that made some sense. But when Carl came and we were all suddenly in a new story, that was jarring. And then we hit another twist to the roller coaster: They were gone, and now it seemed like no one knew which way was up. What story did we have now? Who were we? What was the point of anything?

And if the time after Carl felt calm, it’s largely because no one knew what to say. You can only talk about something not existing for a few weeks before it’s just not news anymore. But at the same time, it was hard to argue about tax policy and health care or even get up and go to work when nothing felt important the way Carl had. People’s identities, their sources of meaning, had been banged up even before Carl, but now a lot of folks were just lost.

One of the more minor changes was of course the reality games. Humans have always loved a hunt, but then the Dream put every single person into a species-wide escape room, so on the whole we got more into puzzles. Reality games were like escape rooms or scavenger hunts, but they were ongoing and took place everywhere, and the best ones went to extravagant lengths to re-create the feeling that the Dreamers had lost. Puzzle masters distribute the game through the internet, physical spaces, and sometimes people. You pay a monthly fee to always be on the lookout for your next clue, whether it comes through the mail, through a chance encounter with a stranger, or on your doorstep accompanied by a cryptic text message from your dead best friend.