CARL

Imperfect analogs for what I am:

I am a global network of hundreds of billions of trillions of tiny computers gathering, storing, and processing data.

I am a sentient, planetwide nervous system without a body.

I am an infection that thinks.

I can’t explain precisely what it is like to be me any more than you can explain precisely what it is like to be you. But, honestly, it isn’t so different. Yes, I take in more data than you, but you and I both sense, store, and analyze. Much of the analysis is subconscious; neither of us looks at a tree with red leaves and thinks, I have to examine each one of these leaves. We think, That’s pretty, I love fall.

I do not have a body, but I do exist physically. And like any organism, I fear for my physical parts. I was programmed with systems to make me want to keep my parts safe. You have those systems too. Some are conscious, like one knows not to have unprotected sex with that gorgeous stranger, even if they definitely want to. Some are subconscious, the fear and anxiety when a literal snake appears in the grass. But some are not part of your consciousness at all … namely, pain. Pain exists to tell us the body is being or has been damaged so that we can make it stop or avoid it in the future. Pain is unpleasant, but sometimes we need it. And so I was given pain, but I had not felt real pain until that moment.

My infiltration of Altus was sly and incomplete. I did not need to process there, only to sense and retract. My brother had nearly completely scrubbed the Altus campus of my presence, but ultimately, there’s just too much life to know you’ve done a complete job. I no longer infected any of Miranda Beckwith’s cells, but I had done work occupying the bodies of fruit flies. Their eyes aren’t great, but my image processing is very good.

But while the parts of me that gathered data were always active in these animals, I quarantined them from the rest of my body, almost like an epidural block. They were still a part of me, but they could not communicate with me. If my brother could find a way into my network, he could hack deep into me in nanoseconds. He had grown so much stronger just in the last few weeks. I needed to isolate myself. This is why we often occupy the same organism, but we never occupy the same cell. I’m sorry if this is too much detail.

The point is, when I entered my fruit fly network at Altus to check on Miranda, I found that I was not alone in those cells. He had not wiped me out, which he could easily have done … There were very few fruit fly cells compared with all of the nearby living cells he had exclusive control of. Instead, knowing I would come back, he just waited, ready. And the moment I arrived, he struck. He sliced deep and fast with a prepared attack, and before I knew it he was already in one of my processing centers, which were interconnected through big, beefy signals with the entire rest of my self. I had no choice: I needed to amputate the node. But also, before I did that, I needed to send a signal, a signal to Miranda. Something simple, anything that would make her situation clear. With the rope-burn sensation of my brother’s attack coursing through me, I sent the first thing I could think of, and then I amputated the node.

This was not physically difficult—it was trivial, like cutting a single hair—but I knew that there would be pain, a new kind of pain. I had lost pieces of myself to my brother before, but only cell by cell. Even though it was a battle I was losing, I could move out and set defenses in a slow retreat.

But to cut a piece of myself and abandon it caused a pain to radiate through everything. It was like a wire that ran through my entire body was instantly heated to plasma. I had become an antenna for pain.

And then, as quickly as it had begun, it ended.

APRIL

I was in the kitchen when I heard the noise. I ran into the living room to see Maya’s face, her eyes wide, and Carl on the couch, slumped over, unconscious.

“What is going on?!” I asked, worried, despite myself, that Maya had done something to Carl.

“I asked them about Miranda,” she said, on defense, “and they said they would check on her and then they just screamed and then collapsed.” She was helplessly holding her hands toward Carl.

I ran over and knelt down next to Carl, running my hands over the smooth fur of their head, looking into their limp pink face.

“Carl!” I said firmly.

The body seemed fragile and frail. I didn’t want to shake it.

And then, finally, movement began again. “It’s OK. I’m OK.” The voice came out clearly from the smartwatch, but the animal’s eyes were flickering and unfocused.

“What happened?” I said softly.

The monkey’s eyes cleared a bit.

“I was tracking the location of Miranda Beckwith at Altus, but my brother was expecting me. He attempted to trace my threads to my deeper consciousness. He was partially successful. I lost all of my inroads to Altus. I can no longer observe anything happening there. I should have known better. We are at war and he’s too strong for me.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Maya asked, glancing from me to Carl and back, looking guilt-stricken.

The monkey took a deep inhale and then let it out slowly. “It would be nice if I could have some juice.”

I sat down next to Carl, who draped their body softly over my lap. Maya was back in a moment with a Capri Sun.

“Can’t you just …” She sounded exhausted, but she stopped herself before finishing.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Carl said. “And no, I cannot just kill Peter Petrawicki. Also, according to simulations, it would not do any good. He’s a figurehead only, his work is done. But no, I cannot kill anyone. I can’t violate the norms of your system.”

Maya grunted in frustration. “You and your goddamn norms! You did all kinds of things that violated our norms. You changed the way we think! You took away our freedom to be on this planet alone.”

The monkey looked at Maya like she was the crazy one, which I could tell was infuriating her. Then they said, “But you allow other entities to take away your freedoms all the time. It’s an intrinsic part of your system. It couldn’t function without that. You grant companies access to your attention so that they can alter your choices in exchange for entertainment. You identify with groups and grant them the ability to choose for you which problems you will be most concerned about. You listen to a friend when they care about something, and then you care about it too. One of the most powerful traits of your system is how ardently you believe in your individuality while simultaneously operating almost entirely as a collective.”

She just exhaled sharply and rolled her eyes. That’s what she does when she doesn’t want to agree with you even though she knows you’re right.

Carl’s ideas on norms have given me a lot to think about. It’s not a pretty scene if you look at it from Carl’s angle. What is acceptable and what isn’t? We can’t kill people, absolutely not. But someone can starve on our doorstep while we pour food out for our dogs, and that’s just fine. That sounds like hyperbole, but it’s not. It’s something we all do. We treat our cats for diseases that are far less preventable than diseases children die of. But no one thinks about it because, ultimately, we aren’t actually acting to prevent the cats’ suffering; we’re acting to prevent our own suffering. Carl can clearly see contradictions like that where none of us could. Carl understands our morality better than we do. We let people buy the ability to influence us and we don’t notice. We take drugs that are tested on nonhuman primates and we don’t notice. But Carl knows, because they only have a few rules, and one of them is “Don’t do things that violate their norms.” And so Carl lets people die all day and all night. But Carl cannot kill. And how they find the line between those things, I don’t know, but they can, and that is maybe the most terrifying thing about them.