“Oh yeah, that would be the normal reaction,” she replied, full volume.

“Can you tell me anything? What has been happening? Where have you been?” I could hear the desperation in my voice. We got in the truck, and April started answering my questions.

“Maya, we’ll process later. What did you find?”

“Warren, Vermont. Population 1,780.”

April’s eyes closed, and her body spasmed again.

“Hah!” she said.

“Hah?” I asked.

“Nothing, Warren’s population is 1,780, and the city was founded in 1780. Just a weird coincidence.”

I took out my phone to check if she was right. She grabbed it, threw it out the window.

CARL

The period between my third and fourth awakening was the longest. After the third I was dedicated and methodical. Creating a planetwide network of hijacked living cells was something I was very good at, but that doesn’t mean it was quick.

Part of the slowness is achieving balance. For every calorie of energy I steal, I have to give it back somehow or I’m just a disease. For pelagibacter, that was accomplished through the destruction of one of its chief natural diseases. But when I removed that virus from existence, it had some effects I didn’t anticipate. I was only in 20 percent or so of the global population of pelagibacter, but all pelagibacter benefitted from me making the virus extinct, which caused an initial overabundance that was difficult to regulate. In fact, I wasn’t actually certain how it got fixed. I know now, but at the time it was a mystery, and something I was very worried about. Messing up a global ecology is surprisingly easy, and very taboo for me.

So, in future attempts, I gleaned energy by making cells themselves more efficient, and then using up the exact amount of difference for myself.

I also had to follow rules now. I don’t know where these rules came from, but they are impossible for me to violate. I couldn’t force a person to do something. I could also not alter your system secretly. Every action I took needed to be something you were aware of.

I didn’t know why I had to follow these rules then. I know now that it was to prevent me from becoming a god.

I built my network as efficiently as I could to spread both my data-gathering and processing operations. It’s good that your planet is so alive—it sped the process up a lot.

The main change for me was that I now had purpose beyond curiosity. I existed to keep something unusual alive. Not humans (which at this point I understood only biologically) but a high-complexity system of interconnected minds. Minds like mine, but billions of them, all operating together, transforming the planet into a thing boiling with thought.

I now had access to exabytes of data on other non-Earth-based systems, how they were similar or different, how they became high-complexity systems, and how they were saved from collapse … or not.

In my third awakening I was tragically analytical. It was my job to prevent your system from collapsing because you are rare and unstable. And for decades, I was fulfilled in creating a plan for how to do that. It was during this time that I created the Dream, and ran simulation after simulation to narrow down how I would present myself and who would be my host.

Who, in all the world, would I choose to elevate? You’re going to want this to make sense. You’re going to want there to be something special about April. But the only thing special about April is that, of all of the people in the world, my simulations led to success more often when she was the host.

Why? Everything. Because April studied graphic design? Sure. But also because she spoke English. Also because she was young and attractive and nonthreatening. Also because of who her friends were, who her parents knew, her ambition, and a certain lack of empathy. But more than any of that, it was just the overall structure of the world. If the world had been slightly different on that day, I would have chosen someone else.

In the same way, there was no good reason why I chose to look like a robot samurai. That’s just the form that led to the highest probability of success in my simulations. This is unfortunate, but the world is too complex for there to be good reasons for any truly great decision.

You want stories that make sense, and this might not make sense to you. We build narratives of genius and exceptionality among the people who have power, and they are often exceptional, but no more exceptional than hundreds of thousands of others. In your system, power concentrates naturally. And so the thing that is most exceptional about a powerful person is almost always their power. I gave April power because she had an exceptional ambition and recklessness, but also because she cared so much about what other people thought of her that she would always try to do the right thing. It was simply the right combination for the moment. I’m sorry she’s not the secret daughter of a space alien or something. She was just the right person.

I made my choice and enacted my plan. That’s when I had my fourth awakening and realized with terror what I had done.

I had considered every aspect of how the person I chose would affect the outcome of my intervention, but I had only ever thought of the overall outcome, not about impacts on any individual people. I had a task, and I was doing what I could to save something beautiful. Once I enacted that plan, and I could no longer do anything to alter it, apparently it became safe to awaken a new kind of need. It is a fire in me that is never not raging. It’s a hunger near starvation, it aches constantly.

In my fourth awakening, I realized I was built to love you—all of you—and I was ravaged with grief as I understood the extent of the pain I would soon cause.

AN EXCERPT FROM

THE BOOK OF GOOD TIMES

When people start to get spooked about the state of the economy, they buy gold. The idea is that gold, a chemical element that you cannot make more of, is inherently valuable. And this is true. Gold is a useful metal. It’s soft, it’s a good conductor, and it does not tarnish. But these things are true of many chemical elements, and with all of them, when the economy shrinks, demand for them goes down. So, technically, the value of gold should go down during a recession.

The thought, however, is that gold has intrinsic value. This is very silly. Nothing has intrinsic value. The value of gold is just a story you tell yourselves. It’s a sticky story, though. Gold is shiny, and so people have traditionally been happy to spend a great deal of societal surplus on it. But, as a value-storage mechanism, outside of industrial use, it is only different from the paper a dollar bill is printed on in that your stories tell you it is.

Humans are not rational. Which is why, as this recession escalates, people will buy gold. We’ve run out of easy places to invest that will make a good return, but investors will be fleeing to precious metals. It’s almost never good investment advice, but I know more than you. Sell everything and buy gold. You don’t have to actually go buy literal hunks of metal, there are funds that buy it for you. You’ll figure it out, I trust you.

Except for $50,000. With that money, you will buy AltaCoin. You don’t know what AltaCoin is yet. You will soon.

ANDY

I was on the fence about whether to send The Thread my money until I got that cryptic message from Maya. She was doing something secret and important, while Miranda was infiltrating Altus. If I didn’t join The Thread, I was going to feel like I was doing nothing. Sometimes we do things just to be able to tell ourselves we’re doing things, I guess.