Oh Jesus, what were we doing?

I told her about The Thread.

“Fuck,” she said. “Hold on.”

I could hear her repeating the news to someone else in the room.

“OK, thank you, I’m going to make a video and send it to you. Because, Jesus, I know the world has changed a lot, but I still know how to make a fucking video. Footage incoming.”

MIRANDA

I could see April writing the script in her head while she delivered the news about The Thread. I’d seen it dozens of times, she was building the outline, rearranging bullet points, molding information into a story. Even with my hand clamped inside a giant robot’s fist with hundreds of zombified Val Verdians just a door away, I loved watching her mind.

But then she said, “I don’t know how to make it work.”

“It won’t,” a voice said, coming from the smartwatch wrapped around the apparently dead monkey’s neck.

“It won’t?” April asked back.

“Nnnnno.”

There was something wrong with it.

“Carl,” she said, so that shed some light on the situation, “what’s wrong?”

And then April’s eyes lost focus, and she fell into Maya’s arms.

“APRIL!” Maya choked, lowering her to the ground.

“It’s …” the monkey said, and then, eventually, “OK. She will … be … back soon.”

Maya was sitting on the floor, gently and slowly stroking April’s hair, when, just a few minutes after she fainted, April lifted herself out of Maya’s lap and sat up on the floor. Her eyes were unfocused, a hard crease between her brows. She sucked in a shuddering gasp of air.

“April,” Maya said, “are you OK?”

“They took me into the Dream,” she said without looking anyone in the eye. “We talked. Carl is … fighting very hard to keep us safe. They don’t know what’s going to happen.” She refocused, looking from me to Maya and back. I could see something was lurking on the other side of her eyes. Something she wasn’t talking about. “They can’t run simulations anymore. But they do know that us broadcasting from our platforms wasn’t ever going to be enough. They are very mad that they didn’t guess that The Thread was more than human. But they can create blind spots in each other.”

“Did they have … any suggestions?” Maya asked.

“No, if I’m being honest with you, Carl did not give me a great sense of confidence. I think they’re … they don’t have all of their resources anymore.”

I looked at Peter as she was saying this, and his face got this look on it like he’d always known he was going to get away with it.

I couldn’t let him be right. I almost got angry. But then I did what I do.

“We have to work the problem,” I said.

“OK?” April answered.

“What is the problem? Tell it to me as simply as you can.”

“We …” She looked sick and distracted by worry. I snapped my fingers in her face, the new face that I had not yet gotten used to, but now was not the time for anything but the problem.

“We need Altus’s investors to sell us the company. They need to believe that it’s worse for them to own it than to sell it for cheap.”

“No,” I said, “that’s the solution. The problem is that Altus … ?”

“That Altus exists?” Maya said. “Carl’s … brother … this other intelligence, they’re going to use it to pacify humans, turn the Earth into a zoo. We’ll be guided through our whole lives and satisfied, and every person who has to die to get us there …” She trailed off. I didn’t need to be told. I was remembering how close I had come to killing her.

“So we have to make Altus not exist anymore, good, I like that.” I looked Peter in the eyes as I said it, and felt the adrenaline rush through me.

“The current plan is still to make them look so bad that investors give up billions of dollars to preserve their public images?” I asked.

“Yeah?” April answered, unsure.

“What we really need to do is break Altus, though. We’re here … Can we do that?” I asked.

“You would know better than us,” Maya said.

But I’m not sure I did. I understood, roughly, how the system worked. But nothing here did anything but push changes to the interface. There was nothing to blow up or break or light on fire.

“Altus just works,” I said, feeling hopeless.

“Except not for everyone,” Maya added, more as an afterthought—she just wanted to not forget about the people who couldn’t get in.

“What do you mean?” April asked, but Maya didn’t answer. She’d seen the look on my face. I had it.

I opened my mouth to talk, but nothing came out. My hand was clamped tightly into Carl’s, but my body was still there for Carl’s brother to control.

My mouth moved, and clumsy and slurred words came out. “It is so easy to predict their decisions, but it is so hard to predict their ideas. It is amazing, isn’t it, brother?”

“Get out … of her,” I heard Carl say.

“You are so delicate,” my voice said. “You failed. There is no shame in failing, only in not accepting that you failed.” I couldn’t move, but my mind was racing. I knew what I had to do! I just had to get free!

“What is going on?” Peter said.

“Hello, Peter.” My head turned toward him, my eyes staring relentlessly into his. “Thank you for building this for me. What a wonderful host you have been for my vision.”

“What …” he said.

“You can’t lie to me. You knew the whole time what I was. I was only ever words on your screen because you had to be able to convince yourself that you didn’t, but you knew.” Even though it was my voice, it didn’t sound like me. My tongue was thick and slow in my mouth.

“Let … her go.” The voice from the smartwatch was quiet, but as tight as piano strings.

“I could kill her now, unless you want to try and stop me,” my voice told Carl. I felt every word as it formed on my lips. “I think, actually, that I will.”

“NO!” April and Maya said together.

An arrow of pain sliced through my head from my eyes down through my back. I thought I was dying, but then it stopped and I realized I was free. My body was mine again. I looked down and saw that Carl no longer held my hand.

“Go now,” Carl said.

“Carl, no,” April pleaded, though I didn’t understand why.

“NOW,” the voice repeated.

I ran.

My legs pumped under me. I crashed through the first door, and then the second, and I was outside. I knew it was wrong to feel good, but I felt good anyway. Just the movement, the feeling of standing still while I pushed the world out behind me. Finally, again a resident of my own body, I tore through the courtyard to the dorms, the joy of it helped me forget the pain in my face. Also, I had some thinking to do.

Every piece of software has a way to let you know that something has changed. You have to have that system, both practically and legally. Altus could have done this the old-fashioned way, with a pop-up. But, y’know, they’re obsessed with themselves. So instead they used an injected experience. Basically, every time they changed the terms of service, they injected a tiny experience that let you watch a woman telling you that the TOS had changed, and then you skipped it. It was gimmicky, but the gimmick was their business, so they did it.