“How is going to the middle-of-nowhere Vermont predictable!?”

“I was able to predict that you would read a book left under a wet, moldy carpet in the trash heap behind a motel. Humans are, to us, very predictable.”

“You put the book there?” I asked, and then immediately followed up with “What do you mean, ‘us’?!” I was not handling any of this well. Then again, I had been shot. April was unconscious. There was a talking monkey. And it was Carl.

“I am going to explain everything, but we make our location extremely improbable as quickly as possible—turn here.”

We turned onto what seemed to be a larger road.

“When April first woke,” Carl told me, “she was unpredictable and very afraid. Her body was incomplete and broken, so I put a protocol in place that would prevent her from feeling too much too strongly.”

“She told me, she said that she couldn’t have strong emotions anymore.”

“That is mostly true, though a couple times it has been more than the protocols would or could control. But it was always meant to be temporary. I need to turn it off. When she wakes up, the protocol will be disabled. She will have her normal emotive processing. It will be difficult.”

We drove for a while as their words sank in, and then we entered a larger town. Large enough that there was a Walmart. “Turn right,” Carl announced calmly. “Left.” And then, in a couple blocks, “Right again.” We had pulled into the parking lot of a high school. “Pull up there.” They pointed toward a windowless brick building.

The monkey and I piled out of the truck. “Why are we at a high school?” I asked.

“Because it’s unpredictable!” The monkey made a flourish with their hands as they said it. I was not amused.

“I’ll be back shortly,” they told me, and then they padded over to the brick wall of the school and swiftly walked around the base. They turned a corner and then they were gone from view.

There was a door on the side of the building that didn’t have an outward-facing handle, and not five minutes later, I heard a scratching coming from it and walked over.

“I’m going to shove the door out, please catch it,” Carl said from inside.

Suddenly the door popped open. I slid my fingers in. It was a big, heavy metal door. I pulled it open, and Carl came out.

“I’ll hold the door open, go get your things from the truck. There is a staircase just inside, go down these stairs. There is a boiler room below. I have collected a number of useful items down there. I’ll bring April down.”

I winced as I pulled the bags out of the back of the truck. I couldn’t breathe without pain; any other movement approached agony. I looked through the back window as I did it and saw April still slumped against the door, as if sleeping.

I carried the bags into the building and gingerly walked down the stairs, doing what I could to concentrate on my steps, not on how Carl was going to “bring April down”—and whether that meant they were going to “inhabit” her body. They certainly weren’t going to carry her; the monkey body weighed like ten pounds.

The boiler room was dark except for the light cast by a couple floor lamps. There was a futon and a couch and a small refrigerator. I opened it and found it stocked with sandwiches and bottled water. A scuffling came from back toward the staircase, and I turned, half expecting to see April walking like a zombie into the room.

But no: Softly, quietly ducking down the stairs was a ten-foot-tall suit of armor holding April, tiny and fragile in its arms.

“She will wake up soon, and she will not be well. It will take time.”

The robot was too tall for the room; it walked, hunched, toward the futon.

I felt so terribly little in its presence. All of the loss and uselessness that we had all been feeling came rushing back. What were we humans next to this?

After April’s life started to change, after she went to LA, after she did her first late-night show, after she moved out of our apartment, I went to see Carl.

It was just a few days after she moved out, and before the government shut down access. The city had put up stanchions, but still the sidewalk was all but impassable. I waited in line for a full two hours, alone, surrounded by people, miserable, and aware that April’s new apartment looked down on this very spot. When I finally got to the statue, I got very close and laid my hand on it. I felt it, that unique “there but not” sensation of Carl’s giant body. And I also felt tremendously unsettled by the mere existence of this thing. I knew what Carl was, even if these people did not. But more prominent than the unwavering knowledge that this thing was not from Earth was just the frustration that it had ruined a thing I needed. I looked up at its face and said, quietly, “Fuck you.” A warmth came through my hand, sudden and brief. I jerked my hand away and left.

You’re supposed to believe all of the same things as your friends and your allies. These days, everything is a battle, and so you can’t give any credibility to your opponents’ views. Even when you do understand where your opponents are coming from, you’re not supposed to say so. Well, as much as I hate it, I’d always felt like the Defenders had one thing right. To me, the Carls did feel threatening. I was scared then in that boiler room, feeling small and fragile and also … just angry. There was a thought in my mind that I couldn’t fight against, and as Carl placed April delicately on the futon and then turned back toward me, I managed to push past the fear and say it out loud.

“I don’t forgive you.”

“I know,” robot Carl replied immediately. Their high, clear voice felt incongruous coming from the giant. “I’m sorry about the dolphins.”

“What?”

“It was a side effect of creating this.” They pointed at me, at the spot where the bullet had gone in, the place where the white stuff had now become a part of me. “There was energy released, it damaged them, and they were not able to recover. I didn’t kill them just to lead you to April.”

“I didn’t think you did,” I said.

“You would have, eventually, if I hadn’t explained it.”

I wanted to ask how they were so sure of that, but before I got a chance, Carl said, “There is food and water in the fridge. Do you need anything else?”

I looked around the room and my eyes landed on the potato sprout. “A grow lamp,” I said, “for the potato.”

“I can do that,” Carl said. And then, with their head hung low to avoid scraping on the ceiling, they walked back to the stairs and disappeared up them.

CARL

You know about my life under my fourth awakening: I lived it in public. I continued to spread. I interacted with you directly. You experienced my intervention firsthand. You gave me the tools I needed to change you. Iodine to catalyze a change in your minds. Americium to let me move my body in space. Uranium to allow me to alter chemical structures instantly.

Yes, they gave me uranium, in China, Russia, and the US, actually.

I’ve only used it twice. The first time was the day after the attacks. Watching the bombers prepare, watching them bring their backpacks of explosives to me all around the world and knowing with a high degree of precision how many people would die and how many would be injured ripped at me. But they were not the first deaths I was responsible for. I saw the suicide rates tick up after the sculptures appeared, exactly in line with my own predictions. Before my fourth awakening, that was just an effect; only after I started on the path did those people become more than data to me.