I ached with anxiety.

Powerful people always thought they had the solutions. What they couldn’t see was that their power was, itself, the problem. “If only we could truly know each other” is a nonsense argument because, even if Altus lets you truly know one mind, there are billions of minds and you simply don’t have the time. And what’s going to keep you from just visiting the minds you find most comfortable? This felt like an old story, and once again, no one was going to listen.

I looked at April, breathing softly beside me.

Except maybe her, I thought.

I reached my arm across her rib cage. She stirred gently beneath my arm and made a little noise. Jesus, I love her so much.

I couldn’t help pulling her to me even more tightly.

“What’s even holding us together?” she asked me.

“Love,” I said. “I guess it’s been love the whole time.”

And then, because I guess she couldn’t help herself, she said, “Also our arms.”

I laughed so hard and suddenly felt so safe.

“April,” I said, turning around to face her, “I want you to be my girlfriend.”

“OK,” she said. “I love you.”

Just like that, after all this time. I propped myself on one elbow, and I almost made a joke of it, but then I saw her eyes.

“I love you too.”

I reached around her and she nestled her head into my neck. Our bodies pushed together, warm and human.

April May

@AprilMaybeNot

I’m sure there are going to be a lot of questions but first I’ll just say, it’s nice to be back. Here’s a video: youtube.com/watch?v=U1dirHGODpM

45.8K replies 2.3M retweets 8M likes

Janice Ashby

@PresidentAshby

@AprilMaybeNot My personal relief, and the relief of the nation, at this news is immense. Thank you, as always, for your voice in … interesting times.

52K replies 36.9K retweets 658.5K likes

Tyler Oakley

@TylerOakley

@AprilMaybeNot GIRL! Welcome back! Come to LA, old-school collab. Let’s eat weird candy and I’ll catch you up on the gossip.

130 replies 5.1K retweets 23.6K likes

Francisco

@Fahm90

April May is “back” and of course I’m happy she was not killed, but I think there are a lot of questions that are not getting answered, and I think it’s important that we start asking them.

4.3K replies 1.2K retweets 6.5K likes

Death BoY

@MrDeathLad

Lefty-twitter is creaming itself over April coming back as if she hasn’t proved exactly what she is. We all said she was a traitor to humans and maybe not even really a human herself, and now look at her. Nothing will convince these people.

351 replies 4.3K retweets 16.4K likes

Maya

DAY TWO OF NINETEEN

Finally, after thinking and talking and fretting, we made the video public.

The world changed and it didn’t.

The comments and tweets of support and love flooded in. Everyone from the president of the United States to Howie Mandel was in April’s mentions. The direct replies to April were almost all extremely supportive, but out there, almost immediately, we were seeing little quiverings of frustration and angst from the people who wanted to capitalize on people’s natural fear of April.

The worst thing about these people is that they didn’t usually feel fear themselves; they were just using it to get attention and grow their influence. As long as this tactic worked, they would never stop.

Weirdly, we spent a lot of that day trying to keep the survey site from crashing. The survey included an opportunity for participants to give us their email address (and allow us to email them if we wanted to). And we asked them some basic questions about what they were worried about or struggling with. And we also asked a very general question—“How do you feel about Altus?”—and that question became … important.

In addition to internet stuff, we also had text messages flooding in. April had already agreed to bring Robin back on to manage her life. Every kind of press outlet wanted April on. An interview, a quote, a single individual strand of hair. Most of those requests had been either declined outright or she had offered up Andy to discuss the Altus Space instead.

Robin had pointed out, correctly, that usually people want to give quotes and be on TV to get their message out. Right now, April wasn’t having any trouble getting her message out all on her own. So instead, the plan was to sit tight, respond carefully to positive things on the internet, and Ignore. Everything. Else. In our free time we would enjoy Mr. Crane’s ludicrous apartment, watch Netflix, read Agatha Christie novels, craft careful and cutting communications that weakened Altus, and dive deep into our survey responses.

Except there were just too many. Even with the survey page being down for most of the first day, we had literally millions of responses to go through. No matter how we filtered, there just wasn’t a good way.

April and I were griping about this around the black marble countertop in the kitchen when Carl came in and overheard us.

“Just do a search,” Carl said.

“The searches take forever and we don’t know what to search for,” April replied. “It’s just a bunch of dumb data. Most of the useful stuff is in text responses, which is impossible to parse.”

Monkey Carl made a little hissing noise with their actually monkey throat, which was what went for laughter for them.

“No, with your mind. You have this power, but you barely ever use it.”

“It hurts her,” I said defensively.

“It’s not that,” April replied carefully. “It’s just … it reminds me of … that I’m different now.”

“April, you are different now whether you use it or not,” Carl said.

“But what would I search for?”

“You are tapping into my processing power. You can ask for anything you like—my systems will process it for you.”

“What?” April said incredulously. “I thought I just got raw data.”

“No! Lord, no, a system collates and returns what you ask for.”

“So I could ask nonspecific questions?”

“Of course. How dumb do you think I am?”

It got strangely normal to talk to a monkey, but it never got normal talking to Carl.

“I don’t know how any of this works!”

I agreed with her frustration. We’d been living with Carl for weeks and they hadn’t mentioned this?

“What do you want to know?”

“I want to know what people don’t like about Altus.”

“OK, yes, that is an example of a question that would not narrow things down effectively.” Carl stroked their monkey chin. “What about ‘I need a summary of the main concerns people have with Altus’?”

“And that will work?” I asked, perplexed.

“I can predict the future,” Carl said, like I was being silly.

I looked over to April, and she had her eyes closed. Suddenly her jaw tensed and her head tilted forward.

“Holy shit,” she said.

“What?”

“Well, I know why people don’t like Altus. I mean, at least the people who responded to the survey. Holy shit. Like, exactly.”