A car appeared at the bottom, speeding toward the intersection. The camera angle panned down to follow it, and the car sliced through the intersection, somehow avoiding any other cars.
“The thing is, most of the time, if a driver blows through a red light, it actually misses the other cars. So far, that has been you. But now …” The view moved up again to show the intersection, except it had changed. Instead of four lanes of traffic, the intersection filled the whole screen. “Every new lane you have to dodge exponentially increases the chances of catastrophe. I was sent here to nudge the cars that were heading toward you, while giving some small direction to the car you are all collectively driving. And I was doing well.” As Carl said this, a car crossed the intersection and it slid cleanly through the traffic, sometimes missing the bumper of another car by what looked like inches. “But then this is when three men met in an anonymous encrypted chat room and hatched a plan to murder April. It was a tiny event. I didn’t see it. I didn’t predict it.” The car clipped the bumper of another car and began to slide sideways into the next lane, and the screen went black.
“This is a simplification. There are not certain outcomes, I run simulations to determine the probability of success. And as April’s visit to the warehouse became inevitable, your chances dropped dramatically. This was interpreted as a failure state, and that is what activated my brother. I should have been deactivated at the same time, but because April survived, I was not. Now he and I are battling. This has, as far as I can tell, never happened before. But he is programmed to deactivate if the chances of humanity’s survival through this gauntlet rise to more than 50 percent.
“We do not have to defeat him, we only need to prove that you can survive.”
“So how do we do that?” April asked.
“Well, first, you stay alive. Where I was nudging the oncoming cars, he will push you into the passenger’s seat and take the wheel. But that’s harder when you exist.” The monkey gestured to me. “You cause uncertainty, and he wants to eliminate that. He will kill you the moment he can. He first tried to physically control you via the police officers, but he now regrets that, and has shown what he is willing to do.”
Carl gave us a moment to think about what had happened to Maya.
“Second, Altus is his key to control, and the key to your system’s collapse. We have to destroy it.”
MIRANDA
I was different from the average Altus employee in a lot of ways, but one very clear one was that most of them were in the Altus Space for at least eight hours a day and I had been in the Altus Space exactly once. After orientation and that brief trip that was cut short by Peanut’s body dislocation, I never went again. I wasn’t afraid of body dislocation. I was afraid of something much more terrifying.
To explain why, it’s important to understand a little bit of how Carl’s Dream worked and also a bit of neuroscience … Sorry!
It initially seemed that Carl’s Dream was only input. They put an image in our minds and then we got to experience it. However, even before I had arrived at Altus, people had figured out that there was also output. Carl did not build the whole Dream; they built a sketch, and our messy meat brains filled in the details. Brains are very good at this. We actually have a whole cognitive mode dedicated to making sense of complete nonsense. It’s called REM sleep.
Your brain gets a signal and it’s like, OK, you’re getting married, cool, and then it gets another signal and it’s like, All right … to Cher, I guess! and then another one: On the USS Enterprise, makes sense to me!
I promise this is all going to become relevant.
Scientists studying the Dream while it was still active had figured out the trick of Carl’s Dream: Detail wasn’t that important. Our dreaming minds would fill in the cracks. But then, when that detail was created, it would be outputted from our minds and into Carl’s systems for everyone else to access. Carl built the framework, but collectively, the Dream was built by Dreamers.
This is really elegant, even beautiful, but it is also terrifying. It meant that Carl could harness the abilities and efforts of our minds. Carl had used it to make the Dream, but I had to wonder what else that ability could be used for.
Here’s what I know about internet media companies, which, to be clear, Altus was going to become: They will do whatever they can to make money. Oh, certainly they’re all run by idealistic-sounding progressives, but when it comes down to whether or not to use their customers to make more money, they will do it.
The basics of the Dream was all publicly available knowledge, but it wasn’t really satisfying because no one had any idea how any of it actually worked. How did information get into and out of our brains? Where was that information stored? How was it processed? For the Altus Space to work, they needed to have figured that out. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew they had done it … they had hacked both an input and an output system for the human brain. Never mind whether any of this was safe (and no one knew whether or not it was since none of it had been used by anyone for more than a few months)—I was absolutely not going to welcome a private company into me. What could they do with that power? Plenty. My mind got exhausted just running through the possibilities. I was pissed off enough about what Facebook did with my personal data; I wasn’t going to give a bunch of start-up bros access to my literal mind.
The product was obviously not ready for release anyway, and it felt like they were using Altus employees as test subjects.
What I did not know—and, indeed, no one I talked to knew—was that it had already been launched. People were using the system. No control, no prescreening, no DATA COLLECTION even. They just fucking put it out there and crossed their fingers!
But again, I didn’t know that at the time. Instead, every night I would lie in my bed and think of all of the amazing and/or terrible things that could be done with the Altus system.
Their planned business model was public knowledge, though, and it was disappointing enough. The only thing Altus was going to give away for free was the ability to make things that you could sell. Of course, nothing could be bought with anything but their currency, which they controlled.
A few weeks after I arrived, every employee got a headset with the Altus software loaded onto it. The Altus induction signal we received did not provide access to anything except the development platform (which is what Andy was using in his last chapter) and a few stock objects. I was never even tempted to put my headset on, but it was so fundamental to the culture of Altus that every single person with access spent every available moment inside the Space that I pretended to use the system as much as anyone else.
After hours, nearly every employee of Altus closed themselves in their rooms to play in the development space and have god knows what done to their brains by this company. The initially jovial feel of Altus completely evaporated after headsets were distributed, as people spent less and less time in public spaces. But that was actually good for me … it made it easier to sneak around.
I was a spy, and my intel gathering was going very well. It’s true that Altus kept a close eye on me, but they also needed my skills, and I was working on a project that was about successfully encoding memories so that one person could live another person’s experiences!