I assumed he said that last part just in case I was still recording audio, which, honestly, I should have been, but I hadn’t thought of it.

He wasn’t completely wrong. We had to convince a lot of people who thought that they were going to get wealthy beyond their imaginations that, in fact, their investments were worth next to nothing. I hadn’t gotten any good dirt on Altus. Peter had been perfect the moment I turned the camera on because of course he had—that was his job.

He had imprisoned Miranda, but if that news came from me, it would just look like we were trying to make them look bad. But we had The Thread. The Thread was credible and had broken big stories before. We just had to get video of Altus being immoral to The Thread, and they could plug it into the video they were nearly ready to release. If we could do it soon, we could get it up before the East Coast was even awake.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, “you really think you’re the good guys?”

He was looking ahead at the door to the building we were walking toward. I looked over his shoulder and saw a man there, crumpled on the ground. I could see fear dawning in him, so I reached forward with my left hand to hold his right and said, “Don’t run away now, Peter.”

I’ll admit that I was enjoying freaking him out. For so long now, I had felt like he was controlling my life. He’s what turned me into a pundit. He created the legions of people who made my life miserable. He was the reason I wasn’t even sure who I was anymore. And now I was getting to control him.

I looked back to the man crumpled on the ground, and for a moment I worried he was now a pile of grape jelly. But as we got closer, another terror kicked in. His skin, from what I could tell in the overhead light shining on him from the building, was the right color, but ropes of fur seemed to have sprouted from his chest. I almost looked away, but then I realized what it was.

“CARL!” I shouted and ran forward, pulling Peter along with me. The monkey was lying on the unconscious man’s chest. “What are you doing?” I asked. But the monkey didn’t move. I reached my right hand out to them, my warm, human hand.

“Aaaapril—” Their voice came out of the watch, slow and then all at once, like ketchup. The monkey body didn’t move at all.

“Carl, what’s wrong?” I said, hearing the terror in my own voice.

“Bring me”—and then there was a long pause—“inside.”

Peter suddenly tried to jerk his hand out of mine, but there was no breaking free of that hand. Then I gave him a merciless squeeze and looked up at him and said, “You aren’t going anywhere.”

I wrapped my arm under the little body. It was warm but absolutely limp, like a dead thing.

Peter opened the door into the building. He didn’t even need to punch in his code—the door looked like it had been broken in with a battering ram. I let go of his hand once the door was closed behind us, and followed him around the receptionist’s desk and through a door into a hallway.

“What the …” Peter said. I peeked out from behind him and, well, I had to agree.

I grabbed Peter’s hand again, yanking him forward in a panic. “What is going on!?”

“APRIL!” Miranda and Maya yelled together.

I had to hold on to the monkey’s limp body and to Peter, but I was moving as fast as I could. Miranda’s face was bruised and scratched and bloody. One of her hands was inside of robot Carl’s massive fist. Maya too looked bad, completely disheveled, and there was a smear of what looked like blood on her neck.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked.

Maya and Miranda looked at each other, but before they could say anything, Carl’s voice came out of the little watch around the completely limp animal: “Put Peter in the other hand.”

At first I didn’t understand, but then I noticed the robot unclench its other fist. I walked Peter over to the robot and put his hand into the massive metal paw. Miranda recoiled a bit against Peter’s presence, even with Carl’s bulk between them.

I placed the monkey gently on the carpet and went to Miranda, wrapping my arms around her as carefully as I could.

“It’s so good to see you,” I said quietly beside her ear. Then I pulled back. “But what the fuck is going on?” I turned to Maya to inspect her. “Are you OK?”

“Yes,” Maya croaked. “I mean, no. Not really. Carl’s … brother. He took control of Miranda’s body and attacked me. He also took control of every person in that room.” She gestured behind us. “I had a little bit of footage, but”—she paused—“my phone was broken in the fight.”

“Fuck … FUCK!” I looked over at Peter, who had the audacity to be smiling just a little bit.

“Well, I have a phone, I can at least film the aftermath.”

“We can’t open that door,” Miranda said. “They’re probably standing there right now, waiting to pour in here and just kill us all.

“Then what do we have?”

“This was the plan?” Peter said.

I turned toward Peter, simultaneously sliding my phone out of my pocket and handing it, behind my back, to Maya. I intentionally stood in place, hoping beyond hope that Maya, partially blocked from Peter’s view, would know what to do with it.

“You were going to show people that we have a few hundred people who voluntarily live inside of the Altus Space and farm AltaCoin for us? Yes, in the US, the labor laws wouldn’t allow that, but this is Val Verde. Companies exploit lax labor laws every day. And OK, even if I did technically put Miranda into the Space full-time without her knowledge, I’m not sure there’s even a law against that! She was an employee, and she agreed to take the high-security assignment.”

“It was kidnapping and you know it,” Maya said.

“Yeah, probably, if it was in the US, but good luck getting Val Verde’s government to prosecute me for anything. The US government already wants to shut me down, but they can’t. I’m here, all of our transactions are in our own currency. They can sanction the crap out of Val Verde, but we have everything we need here, and more than enough AltaCoin to buy whatever we don’t have. Any little mistakes we make, any details that you disagree with, they’re nothing. We’re pushing humanity to its next incarnation.

“Fuck ethics. Fuck morals. Altus is the future. Governments are over.”

He looked so little and unimportant, with his Caribbean tan and his business casual attire.

“But did you know?” Miranda asked.

“Did I know what?” he said, his voice heavy with disdain.

“That your technology wasn’t built by humans. And I’m not just talking about the changes Carl made to our brains so we could have the Dream. I know you know that. Did you know that an alien intelligence is moving those people around in there? That when I needed to go to the bathroom, some external, nonhuman intelligence is what moved my body for me?”

He was quiet for a long time, but then finally he said, “I don’t care how the technology works or where it comes from, I just care that it works.”

“So you did know,” I said.

“I didn’t ask questions. It worked, so we kept using it.”

“You didn’t build any of it, you don’t have any genius collaborators. You’re just doing what they tell you to do,” Maya said.