I looked down at her. From her hairline, around her nose, and down through her jaw, the left half of her face shone like an oyster shell. I said the first thing that came to my mind.

“Shit, that looks badass.”

She punched me in the shoulder, which actually hurt a little.

“I’ve heard you’ve been busy,” she said, and her voice was 100 percent April.

I thought about that for a second and then said, “You planted a lot of seeds, I’ve had some gardening to do.”

“Jesus, Andy,” she retorted immediately, “you do sound like a pastor. I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”

I suddenly was. “I was told to bring food,” I said. “It’s in one of the two massive refrigerators.” I gestured over my shoulder.

“It is really good to see you.” As she said it, we all heard the elevator softly ping in the other room. April and Maya looked at each other, eyes wide and brows knitted. “Is someone else supposed to be coming?” Maya said.

When no one replied, she pulled a knife out of the knife block and then went and hid behind the kitchen island. I didn’t know what to do, so I joined her until I heard a voice say, “Holy s’moly.”

It was Robin. I stood up and saw April holding him. His arms were wrapped around her. In his right hand he held a small leather-bound book.

I know I’m not the first one to mention this, but I feel like I need to reemphasize that it is really weird to talk to a monkey and really weird to talk to a space alien computer program, but it’s, like, unsustainably weird to talk to both at the same time. But then, like everything, somehow you just get used to it.

I didn’t want to let April out of my sight. It seemed like this new reality could pass into a dream with any shift in the wind. In that way, it felt a lot like what it was like when April was suddenly gone. Adjusting to a new reality just takes time, and your mind keeps looking for signs that the old reality was the real one.

My brain was having an easier time with the talking monkey than it was with April being alive. It had happened! Everything since that “Knock Knock” had led me to this. I had done everything right.

But as pleased as I was with my actions, I found myself dancing around my obsession with Altus. I knew I was doing the right thing by trying to get more information about how it worked, but also I didn’t feel like explaining to April that I was well on my way to being one of the first people in the world to get access to some deluxe experience championed by Peter Petrawicki.

“Why do you think Altus is keeping the Space so exclusive?” April asked me.

“What do you mean?”

“Why aren’t they giving it to everyone? What’s the cost to them?”

“Well, I don’t know. It must cost money to run, so maybe they need to sell access. They’ve built a massive office in Val Verde, and they took a lot of investment from extremely rich people that want their investment back, I guess,” I answered.

“Neither of you are correct,” Carl spoke, for the first time in a while, through their smartwatch.

“Yeah, I don’t love agreeing with the monkey, but you’re both not getting the point,” Maya added.

“Your system is fueled by the creation and capture of value,” Carl said. “The goal is to capture as much value as you create, though in practice that is more or less impossible. Altus is creating false scarcity because they think that is the best way to capture the value they are creating—there’s no more to it than that. They’re just following the incentives of the system.”

“But isn’t the point to create value?” April asked the monkey.

“That is unclear.” They scratched the back of their little head. “Creating the value is what people publicly praise, but capturing value is what is actually rewarded. Altus is creating value, likely far more than it is capturing, at least right now. But your system does not have good ways of even recognizing the existence of value that is created but not captured.”

We all looked at Maya.

“Yeah,” she said, “that.”

We had all finished snacking by then, so we moved to the giant living room. Robin and I couldn’t stop looking down at the precipitous views of the city.

I plopped onto the couch. It was a beautiful cool, soft, mottled-gray leather, but somehow not particularly comfortable. And that’s where I was sitting when we went all the way down the rabbit hole.

“The situation we’re in, if you’ll allow me to summarize”—April gestured at the monkey, and they dipped their head forward—“is that an advanced intelligence determined that we will very likely destroy ourselves sometime in the next couple hundred years and sent an envoy to attempt to set us on a better path. That failed, and so now that envoy has been replaced by another … I dunno what to call it … entity, I guess, that is going to, instead of nudging us into a better course, control every individual human’s decisions. We don’t know how that entity is going to do it, but we do know that it probably has something to do with Altus …” The monkey raised their hand here, and April paused.

“It may be that Altus is part of the intervention—I can’t know—but I do know that Altus’s existence makes it extremely likely that you will eventually destroy yourselves without intervention.”

“How?” I asked, getting a little nervous about what I’d already been hiding from Maya and April.

“It is not simple. You will create simple narratives as it happens, but they will all be incorrect. The largest affecting factors will be tremendous concentration of power in the hands of fewer and fewer people, who will then destabilize the world to protect that power, large-scale isolation caused by easy alternatives to community and society, and a change in the speed of transfer of information that will be too rapid for norms and taboos to prevent it from being used maliciously.”

“That sounds … familiar,” Maya said.

The monkey seemed to smirk. “All of this will make you less able to handle unlikely but ultimately inevitable catastrophes. Especially if they compound. A war on top of an unstable climate on top of a pandemic, for example.”

“Why are you telling us this?” I asked.

“Because if my brother has his way with you, it will be a catastrophic loss for the galaxy.”

Robin’s eyes widened and he said, “Your … brother?”

“Yes, we are siblings.”

“Shouldn’t your”—I had to think about what I was going to say—“your loyalty be to your own people?”

“You are my people. I don’t know who created me. Based on the data given to me, systems like yours tend to be short-lived. Ultimately, all beauty is transitory, but there’s no choice except to believe it is worthy. I am still doing what I was created to do. Allowing my brother to destroy your beauty would be contrary to my programming.”

I mulled that over for a while, and then April took back over.

“So, we all agree with Carl. Humanity shouldn’t become the beloved pet of a planet-wide conscious infection. But the only way to prevent that is to change the world enough that we probably will not destroy ourselves. And the best way to do that is to make Altus not exist anymore. Andy, how do you feel about that?”