See, being in a mind prison was a big problem, but it was not the biggest problem.

Altus was a miserable, terrible, immoral thing, and it was gathering a huge amount of power and had to be destroyed. And if I wanted to fix that problem, I needed to think much bigger than just “How do I get out of here?”

Altus had kept me working. I could only guess why, but I could actually “enter the Space” and continue building the sandbox that I had been assigned. My guess was that they wanted to be able to tell people that I was “working” for them while I was imprisoned, and this would strengthen their case. They would just tell people I was lying about being held against my will, I guess.

While I did my busywork, I kept looking for new assets, trying to reimagine the problem, and waiting for something to fall out. Something had to fit, because I could not accept that failure was an option.

The goal of big American business is to monopolize everything. Amazon started out with books, but then they moved into every kind of shopping one could imagine, and then also audiobooks, and a streaming video platform, and in-home artificially intelligent butlers.

The goal is to lock every single person into one platform—to own them from sunup to sundown, to know everything about them and monetize their every thought. Altus took that beyond the biggest, sweatiest dream of even the most delusional Silicon Valley billionaires. You didn’t even need to leave to sleep! Aside from the frustrating needs of the body, you could live your entire life there. Your home, your work, your learning, your life could be in the Space. The only thing it didn’t have … and I wasn’t sure if this was good (because it meant people would have to leave) or deeply dystopian (because I’m not sure if they would) was social interaction.

The system Carl created and that Altus had hacked into just didn’t allow socializing. You could inhabit other people having social interactions, but you couldn’t have one of your own. What did that mean for the human race? I don’t know, but it seems like the kind of thing you’d want to do some science on before you converted the entire economy to it.

But instead it was being done by a company that thought nothing of converting humans to a cryptocurrency server farm and imprisoning a dissenting employee in her own mind. But what was going to stop them? They had their own country, their own currency, and an IT infrastructure that spidered through the Earth’s very ecology.

Me. I was going to stop them. Because I added new assets and widened the scope of the problem and I tossed it around. I thought of nothing else, and then, finally, something fell out.

MAYA

DAY ONE OF NINETEEN

Somehow I’m the one who gets this chapter. After we’d uploaded the video, we still had a lot of hours before the morning when we were planning to make it public. There was too much stress and worry, too much tension for sleep to come easily. And also, April had been … open with me. She’d been vulnerable. She had also been thoughtful, and she’d said a lot of things I’d only dreamed of her saying.

Everything felt too important to just turn on Queer Eye and zone out, so instead, I caught myself just staring at April while she stared at her phone. Her body was different and the same. She moved the same, but still you could sense the new power in her. And the set of her jaw wasn’t the same either. There was tension there, all the time. And in the little spot between her eyebrows, right where the new skin and old skin came together, was a little crease that almost never went away.

I tried not to look too much at the parts of her that were new, but they were hard not to focus on.

“It’s OK, you can look at me,” she said, looking up from her phone, where she had been texting someone. Probably her parents.

“You’re beautiful,” I said.

“But I’m also interesting, I know. I’ve stared and stared. It’s gotten less weird,” she said, “a little.”

I traced my fingers down the fabric of her shirt on her left side, from her ribs down to her hip. It was all new skin under there. “Can you feel that?” I asked.

“It feels good,” she said, her voice tight, like she was terrified to say anything else.

This was a decision for me. But it also wasn’t. April had never hurt me just to hurt me, and that mattered. But she had known she was hurting me and done it anyway. I had watched her destroy herself for attention. And here was this small woman, as soft as water, as strong as iron, with the responsibility of the world crashing down on her every moment, just sitting there texting her mom.

But it wasn’t the strength that I loved. It wasn’t the growth or the change or her face. I loved April. The decision I made was to stop denying myself that love out of spite or fear. I was done holding back.

I flattened my hand out and tucked it under her shirt, feeling the seam where the new skin met the old skin on her back. And then I pulled her into me.

She tasted like April.

We went slow, remembering each other’s bodies. It was the best parts of something new all mixed with the best parts of something comfortable. Even the clumsiness felt like a dance. I had been falling for months, and she caught me.

Afterward, I felt more than ever that April was still April—maybe she had been taught a couple of lessons, but she was still as bold and wild and smart and stupid as the day we met.

Sleep came quickly for her, almost like there was a switch in her brain. But for me, what with the species-level-threat anxiety, it did not.

So I took out my phone. April was the social media icon, but I’m not immune to the scroll.

I wanted to know more about Altus. What I found was … a lot. The Premium Space was now open to thousands, and those people had plenty to talk about.

One of them was a YouTuber who played video games very well but also was known for having opinions loudly. I popped in my AirPods and watched his video.

“This is going to change everything,” he said in a clear, authoritative British accent. “This is like the internet times a thousand. I know that I usually am just on this channel to joke around, but this is …” He seemed at a loss for words before there was a cut and he continued: “The Premium Space isn’t just about what you can make and sell and build. They’ve found a way to capture the experiences of other people and let you replay those experiences in your head. You think their thoughts, feel their emotions, and live inside of their bodies. You can understand someone completely. We have been searching for a solution to the division that the internet has created, and this might just be it. To truly understand your enemy is maybe to no longer have enemies. Can you imagine? Not just that, but the possibilities for education. You can learn through someone else’s understanding. I know the Premium Space is only open to a few people right now, I’m sure there’s lots of testing to do. I can’t imagine how difficult this is to pull off, but I’ve been inside the Premium Space for less than an hour and it has already changed my life. And I’m sorry this video is so short, but I need to go back in. I need to see how far this stretches.”

My skin was crawling. I was thinking about Kurt “You Can’t Joke About Anything Anymore” Butler, and whether people like him would work to understand me or if I would be asked, once again, to understand people like him. Call me a pessimist, but I think if bigotry could be solved by access to more information, it would have been solved by now. Hate isn’t about a lack of understanding; it’s about hate.