“That’s good,” she said, quietly now, calming down.

Why had I been so afraid of this conversation? Was it that I didn’t want to talk about April? Or was it that I was afraid Maya and I didn’t make sense as friends without her? Maybe both, but both of those fears were misplaced. We shared something hard and pure: We both had lost our best friend. First we lost her to fame, and then we lost her for real.

“Anything else interesting going on?” I changed the topic.

“Oh, well, yes. I don’t really know how to explain it. Have you heard anything about Fish?”

“Fish?” I said.

“It’s a reality game, except you don’t have to pay and the reward for winning is apparently better than infinite orgasms.”

“I have heard nothing about it,” I said.

“Well, if you hear anything, let me know. I think it might have something to do with Peter Petrawicki’s Altus thing. Or maybe with the Carls. It seems weird. Like Carl weird.”

“Oh, did you hear about Miranda?”

“I heard she was trying to get a job with Altus. I told her it sounded reckless, but I didn’t try to stop her.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much the conversation I had with her too,” I lied. “I hope she doesn’t do anything dumb.”

“She’s smarter than all of us combined.”

“Smart people do lots of dumb things.”

The book was right. I needed to talk to Maya. We talked about how I was thinking about communities and that I was taking a break from being constantly present on social media, but that I still thought it was extremely important for me to keep an eye on my feeds. She told me about her parents, and she gave me an update on April’s family, who I hadn’t kept in touch with at all.

I felt so much better afterward. This is going to sound silly, but I felt more real. It felt more like the last year of my life really did happen, and that the life I was leading really was a life—not some bizarre game I was playing, but a way to live. My way to live.

At one point she said to me something I’ll never forget: “If someone had told me that Andy Skampt would become a thoughtful and respected leader two years ago, I would not have believed them. But having watched it happen, it actually makes a lot of sense.”

There was nothing she could have said that would make me happier, and there was no one in the world I would have rather heard it from.

Maybe I didn’t need to join The Thread to feel important.

But then again, of course I did.

MIRANDA

I had given up on hearing back from Altus and was settling back into a routine. Every weekday morning I walked from my marvelously overpriced downtown Berkeley apartment to the lab. Every afternoon I walked back home. And every evening I went for a run.

I think I ran for distraction as much as anything. The rhythm of feet pounding and heart beating and breath flowing in and out. It’s as close as I can get to making my mind turn off.

At the lab, I was going through the motions with the Toms, pushing atoms around and simulating nerve clusters and occasionally running fruitless tests on Maya’s weird rock thingy. And while my simulations ran, or I waited for data to crunch, I would scroll through Twitter. Sometimes I scrolled through normal Twitter, but I also had a bad habit of going back in time. I’d just do an advanced search for April’s tweets from the current week a year ago and read through, remembering how exciting that period was. It all seemed so silly and trivial then. I wanted it back. I remember specifically that that’s what I was doing when an unknown number popped up on my screen.

“Hello?”

“Miranda, this is Dr. Everett Sealy from Altus, we spoke a couple weeks ago on a video conference.” He seemed confident and comfortable, like he’d made similar calls a thousand times.

“Yes! Hello, I’ve been excited to hear from you.” My armpits were immediately sweaty.

“We were wondering if we could have one final interview with you on-site.”

“On-site?”

“Yes, here in Puerto Rico. We’d fly you out.”

“So, I’d come out, talk to you in person, and then fly back and then wait to hear if I got the job?”

“It’s not that big of a deal. No passport required even.”

By this point in the conversation I had already looked up flights to San Juan, which were around ten hours nonstop, and said, “I don’t actually know where you are in Puerto Rico.”

“That’s a little complicated, but you don’t have to worry about travel, that’s all been handled. If you’re interested in continuing the conversation, we’d like you to fly out tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” I said immediately, without thinking.

“I know that’s sudden, but we only have two speeds here, complete standstill and extremely fast. We have a flight booked for you from SFO to Miami, we’ll pick you up there.”

“You’ll pick me up?”

“Yes, our campus isn’t close to the San Juan airport, so we’ve chartered a flight for you from Miami. A few other recruits will be joining you. We’ll email you the details as soon as you confirm.”

“What if I’m not able to get away from work?”

“Your work …” he said, “is not so important that you should miss this.”

I didn’t say anything to that, and eventually he continued. “So, I’ll see you tomorrow?”

I swallowed. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

My first stop after the call was Dr. Lundgren’s office.

“They want me to fly to Puerto Rico tomorrow.”

“Good god, of course they do. Jesus, textbook asshole. I’ve been recruited before, and it’s either done honestly and thoughtfully, or it’s done like a magic trick. This is the magic-trick kind. They’re starting by knocking you off balance, they’ll continue by impressing the shit out of you. Then they’ll send you back home without any real information to wait for their shitty offer.”

“Do you think I’ll find out anything useful there?”

“In an interview? No. It’ll all be standard. They’re looking for competence and communication and ‘cultural fit.’ ” If you can ever get yourself a no-nonsense mentor like Dr. Lundgren, NEVER LET THEM GO.

“Ugh, I get the feeling that I’m not going to have the best vibe with these people.”

“No, but you get what they’re about, and you can fake it.” She had a glint in her eye I’d never seen before. “And, Miranda, they’ll take your phone from you the moment you arrive. They’re not idiots. Go get a prepaid cell phone and text me the number, just in case you want to take quick photos or ask me questions. You don’t want to be completely isolated.”

In Miami, I was shuffled away from the main airport by a man holding a sign that read “Beckwith.” We took his car to a separate tiny airport that was somehow hiding just outside the big airport. It had free coffee and cookies and big TVs and comfy leather armchairs. There were no gates, just a pair of sliding glass doors that opened onto the tarmac.

I dragged my roller bag over the tiled floor, looking at the handful of other people lounging around the airport. There was a family with two young children, a couple pilots sharing a coffee, a couple guys in business suits, and two guys in their late twenties watching cable news and chatting. I felt like it wasn’t impossible that they were also headed to Altus, so I walked toward them.