He knocked quietly on one of the doors, and it opened to show a warm-looking library with some healthy-looking potted plants and a comfortable-looking leather chair. Sitting in that chair was a young woman, a little older than me, with bold eyebrows cresting over hazel eyes. Her most striking feature was her completely bald head, on which had been stuck a collection of electrodes.

“Aletha …” Peter walked up to the woman with his hand out. She shook it. “This is Miranda Beckwith. Miranda, this is Aletha Diaz.”

“Hi, Miranda,” she said, her English slightly accented. “Sorry for not getting up. It’s kinda a pain in the ass to do it once I get all hooked up.”

“No,” I choked out, “don’t worry about it.”

“I wanted to bring you here so you could see how this works firsthand. Aletha, what would you say your job is?”

“Basically, I read. I love reading anyway, and now I’m getting paid a lot of money to do it.”

“And while Aletha reads, we read Aletha. Miranda, it’s about time you understood what we really do here.”

I thought he was just going to keep going, but apparently he needed my approval so I said, “Yes … please.”

“When Carl came to our world, two big things changed. First, I believe when April pressed the iodine to Hollywood Carl, she triggered a change to her own mind that quickly spread to brains all over the world. But it never made sense to people studying this stuff. How was that alteration transmitted and, more than that, how was the Dream stored? It was the same for everyone, but it wasn’t in our minds before that. And it was massive! Imagine how much storage space something that large and detailed would require!”

None of this was new information for me, or anyone really, but it felt impolite to interrupt.

“A few people who were not happy about the Dream started to investigate it deeply, and something they discovered was that, if two people went to an area of the Dream that was completely unexplored at the same time, they would actually experience it slightly differently. But then, in the next twenty-four hours, a stable version of their experience would be settled on, and both would see the exact same thing from then on.

“That’s when we realized that the Dream was not only something Carl created. It was a framework, and we were filling in the details. And THAT,” he almost yelled, “was the second thing.”

I disagreed with his version of the story a bit, it hadn’t just been people who weren’t happy about the Dream who had figured this out, but I didn’t need to get into it with him, so I just said, “Yeah. People have known about that for a long time.”

He looked a little annoyed, but then he went on, “Well, what no one knows outside of this island is where the information is being stored.”

Ah, I thought, yes, that is a big deal.

“It’s in everything,” he said, his eyes wide with wonder.

“It’s in … everything?”

“Everything alive. Before the Carls even changed our minds, they changed our world. They transformed every living cell on the planet into a tiny computer capable of storing a tiny amount of data and, more importantly, capable of transmitting data extremely rapidly. It’s like every tree has a trillion Wi-Fi routers in it. It’s mind-numbing. It’s terrifying. When the Carls left, they took the Dream, but they left their computer.

“Miranda, I’ll be honest with you, we don’t completely understand how it works. But their system reads information from people’s minds and moves it into other people’s minds. We didn’t have to build it; we just had to figure out how to use it. That’s what’s happening in Aletha’s mind right now. We activate the areas of Aletha’s brain that the Carls created to allow information to be transferred out of her mind and into their network. And then we send signals to your mind that call the information out for you to experience. Figuring out how exactly to do that was not easy, but we found a way.”

It didn’t escape my notice that Peter hadn’t told me exactly what that way was.

“So that’s how the Altus Space works?”

“And there’s more. We have commercialized this system.” He gestured to Aletha’s head. “Soon, anyone in the world will be able to create experiences for the Altus Space and sell them in an open market. We are going to make a lot of skilled and talented people very wealthy.”

If that was true, it was huge. It meant Altus could outsource content creation. They could be the YouTube of full-immersion VR. Someone could strap a rig to their head and go skiing or take a math test or have sex and sell that moment of their lives to anyone with a headset. And, I’m sure, the only currency you could use would be AltaCoin. I didn’t know a lot about business, but I knew when I heard an idea that could easily take over the whole entire world.

“So, I mean, not that I’m complaining, but why are you telling me any of this?”

“Because you’re leveling up, Miranda. This is your job now. You’re going to work in here. You’re going to be like Aletha, one of our clients, but you will be building sandboxes for Altus users.”

I am not bragging when I say that this sounded like a tremendous under-utilization of my skills. I had not been hired to make digital environments, I was a research scientist! Was this a punishment?

“Thank you, Aletha,” Peter said, and then he took me out of the room.

“OK, Miranda, one more thing to see!”

We walked down another ten meters of that long, chill hallway, and then, at the end, Peter opened a door. Light poured through it and I staggered back, not understanding what I was seeing. The room was huge and bright, maybe fifty meters on a side, and it was completely packed with hundreds of hospital beds. It looked like an emergency field hospital for a war or a pandemic. A few people were wandering around, their eyes staring straight ahead, ignoring us, maybe headed to the bathroom or to a lunch break, but most were lying in the beds with headsets strapped to their faces. They all looked local—dark hair and brown skin. Every one of them was wearing an Altus headset. Everyone had a bundle of wires snaking off from them into the floor.

“What …” I said.

“This is the server farm,” Peter said proudly.

I turned to him. He was not smiling, but his eyes had a terrifying glint of pride in them.

“What?” I said.

“AltaCoin is the world’s first cryptocurrency mined by the human mind. More efficient, and more available. Everyone will be able to be a part of this economy.”

Everyone who can afford a headset, I thought.

“Soon, we will make it so that everyone can mine in their sleep, but before then, we had to create an initial supply. So that’s what the server room is for.”

“But these are people,” I said, and the question was there for him to answer.

“Yes, employees. They are being taken care of. They are working for Altus.”

“Why haven’t I ever seen any of them around, though?” I asked, trying to make him see the same thing I was seeing.

“They live here.”

“Where?” I asked, wondering where we could possibly have a dorm that could house all of these people.

“Here,” Peter said.

It took a few moments to realize that when Peter Petrawicki said that they lived here, he meant … this room. They lived in those beds. I didn’t respond. Why was he showing me this? I didn’t know if it was illegal, but it was definitely indefensible. It was the kind of thing that you should not tell someone who you do not trust.