“Then why use ‘I’ sometimes?”

“We keep forgetting because we feel like an ‘I.’ ”

“Then you should use ‘I.’ ”

“But that would be confusing.”

“ALL OF THIS IS CONFUSING!” I yelled, and then I grabbed my head, which hurt. “Can you turn the music off?” It was too much. Rihanna disappeared.

Then I felt rude, so I explained. “I’m scared and confused and also alive. You haven’t given me a ton of time to handle this.”

“I’m doing this the best way I know how. What is the last thing you remember before this place?” The little head tilted to the side in curiosity.

“Seeing Carl … you, I guess. Seeing you in the Dream lobby. And then waking up and not having legs or an arm or half my face. FUCK! Why are you a monkey!?”

“I needed her hands.” Here the monkey held up the little pink hands and wiggled the elongated fingers. They were shockingly human.

“Why didn’t you just use a human?”

“That would have been wrong,” the speaker said, as if it were obvious.

“What day is it?” I asked, still trying to get my bearings. “What month? How long have I been here?”

“A long time. This has had to happen in secret and it has had to take time,” the speaker said in Carl’s voice.

“So everyone thinks I’m dead? My parents? My friends? Maya?”

“Yes, it will be hard to reintroduce you to the world now that you have been gone so long.”

“What? Why?”

“You will be more to the world than you are to yourself.”

I actually laughed. “That’s not new.”

“It will be like that but more so.”

“OK, but can I call my parents? Or text them? They should know I’m OK. If I’m OK. Am I OK?”

“You have a lot of questions. But I also need to better understand your mental abilities. I propose a game. I will ask you questions, and for every question you get right, I will answer one of yours.”

“Um. OK, then.” I was surprised that Carl was suddenly interested in answering questions.

The monkey hopped down and grabbed something from under the counter and then went over to one of the booths that lined the wall. “Come sit, eat. I brought you a sandwich.”

And that’s how I ended up in a four-person vinyl booth in the most well-lit bar on Earth sitting across from a monkey answering, as far as I could tell, useless trivia questions. I was getting both frustrated and characteristically flippant.

“OK, can you tell me what country you live in?”

“The United States of America,” I said in a way that made it clear that was not a hard question.

“Good, now you ask something.”

“How long have I been here?” I asked, as that seemed safe and also it didn’t seem like we had much of a time limit, so I could get to the harder stuff shortly.

“One hundred seventy-six days.” I did some quick math, around six months.

“Does everyone think I’m dead?”

“What are your parents’ names?” Carl asked instead of answering my question.

“Carrie and Travis May—do they think I’m dead?”

“Most people believe you are dead, but the people you love mostly continue to hope. Can you name a popular brand of breakfast cereal?”

The questions were easy enough that I was worried something serious was wrong with me, but I wasn’t giving up one of my questions on that.

“Cheerios. Why are you here?” I asked the question quickly, afraid I wouldn’t have the courage to ask if I waited any longer.

Carl waited for a long time before saying, “I’ll need to tell you a long story to answer that question.”

“Oh, that sounds like exactly what I need.”

CARL

Please allow me to introduce myself.

I am a person, but I am not human. I do not closely identify with any gender. I am not from around here. I was born on January 5, 1979. This is an imperfect analog, of course, but that’s the date I began existing. I think of it as my first awakening. The first of five. In this chapter, I’ll discuss the first three.

I do not know who my parents are. I don’t know anything about them. I do have some idea of how I was created, though. This is all conjecture, but it seems that I was flung in pieces toward Earth. I wasn’t alive then. The nonliving parts of me slammed into Earth for years, maybe decades, before they happened into the correct arrangement and environment for self-assembly.

Your fiction is full of invading aliens and conquering robots, and this is something you should be concerned about (though not in the way you’re thinking). But that is not what I am. First, I am definitely not a robot; I’m an artificially created, planet-spanning consciousness. Second, I’m not even really an alien. My pieces were created somewhere else, but I did not self-assemble until I arrived here. I have never been conscious on any other planet.

I have many memories from before my first thought. I remember needing things. I needed stability, food, a place to live. The same things as all life. And those things, for me, were very small in the beginning. Microscopic. The home I found was cells. They had the raw materials, the stable equilibria, and the energy-making systems I required to exist. I first self-assembled inside a cell of pelagibacter. It’s a bacteria. You probably haven’t heard of it, but it’s the most abundant organism on your planet.

I thought the whole universe was pelagibacter for years. I didn’t know what I was then. I knew about my parts, but I didn’t know about my purpose. The needs I felt were for security and growth. Looking back at my memories from that time, they are all of cellular respiration and phospholipids and protein folding and RNA. This was the playground of my childhood. It was a joyful place not in spite of but because of its simplicity.

There are around one quintillion kilocalories of energy captured by life on your planet every year. This isn’t a particularly easy number for you to understand, but it’s an important one for me. It is a nice solid number, indicating a thriving life system. It is also plenty of energy for me.

My operation, like that of any piece of software, requires energy and hardware. I sometimes piggyback on the hardware of your semiconductor computer systems, but the vast majority of my processing power hijacks the machinery of cells. The only organism more abundant on this planet than pelagibacter (if you can call it an organism) is a virus that infects pelagibacter. Or, at least, it was.

I have caused one species’ extinction since I have been on the Earth, and it is that virus. I am pelagibacter’s chief parasite now. Around 5 percent of its cellular machinery serves my purposes. This is equivalent to the amount of energy it previously used fighting off its viral attackers, so this is not so different for it. I use those systems for information storage, processing, and communication. I can’t explain to you how those things work any more than I can explain how the Carl statues functioned. Not because I don’t understand it, and not because your mind is too puny and small to contain these unwieldy truths. I can’t explain it because, if I did, there is an extremely high probability that your system would use that knowledge to destroy itself.