Andy Skampt

@AndySkampt

I know this is going to be a shock to a lot of people, but I am officially done with Altus. This company has taken the greatest tool humanity has ever seen and turned it evil. I just sent in my $10, it’s your turn.

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MAYA

Finally, Miranda explained everything to me. We all watched the entire process of capturing an Altus experience using one of the rigs that were in the rooms that lined the long hallway. And then, after that work was done, we brought Sippy and his headset out into the hall where the massive robot Carl still sat gripping Peter Petrawicki’s hand.

“We wanted you to see this,” I told him.

“What are you doing?” He looked pale.

“Peter, this is Sippy, he’s one of your user interface developers,” I told him. “He is about to input a terms of service experience. Every single person will get this message when they log in to Altus. And everyone currently in the Space will see it the moment they leave their current sandbox or experience. That’s how the terms of service updates work, right?”

“And you think if you explain that what we’re doing here is immoral that you’ll somehow hurt us? Maybe a little. But nothing you can do will stop our work here.”

I rolled my eyes at him. “This is Peanut.” Peter looked at him. “He’s also one of your employees, you might remember him because he can’t go into the Altus Space. He’s what people here call an incom … incapable of experiencing the Altus Space. But nothing about being unable to go into the Altus Space makes it impossible to capture an Altus experience.”

Peter looked confused for a moment, but then his face went slack. He looked ill.

“You can’t do that,” he said.

“I can tell from your face that you know we can,” I said.

“No, I mean, you can …” He was starting to beg. “But you can’t. Think about what you’ll be doing. You’ll be … you’ll be making a decision for all those people. Disabling them. It’s an attack. It’s terrorism!”

Sippy looked over at me. I could see him questioning. He would lose the Space too, forever. Everyone would.

“What gives you the right?” Peter asked.

I leaned down into his face and said softly, “What gave you the right?” I could see that Sippy wasn’t as certain as he had been a few minutes before, so I continued. “Power is nothing but ability without restriction. You found a way to do this to the world. I found a way to undo it. That’s where we are.”

“Your body is just thirty trillion cells working together,” Peter said, ignoring everyone but Sippy. “With Altus, humanity could finally be like that, seven billion people operating in radical, perfect empathy! This is the next step in human evolution, and you’re going to destroy it.”

“No, you destroyed it.” Miranda bit off the words. And then she turned to Sippy. “He destroyed it when he decided to only use it for his own personal gain. He wants so badly to feel important that everything he does gets sucked into that hole. It was almost me. It was almost the whole world. Almost.”

“Sippy, no,” Peter begged. “No, we can fix this. I’ll let you help me fix it.”

Sippy looked at Miranda’s face. She looked hard and sad but also strong, with brown smears of dried blood still marking her chin and neck.

“They’re right, we messed up, but you can’t let them do this!” Peter yanked his hand against Carl’s hand. It held like steel. He strained toward us. “You can’t just destroy everything I’ve built.”

“Everything you’ve built?” Miranda said, sounding shocked.

I laughed a little. “He’ll never admit to how deeply he’s been used. That thing that fed him all of the information on how to build this, it wants to destroy us. It took over Miranda’s body and tried to use it to kill me.” I went over to Sippy and pulled my collar down to show him and Peanut the claw marks on my neck.

My mind raced. I had thought about this a thousand times, but I’d never tried to say it out loud. And now I felt the world pressing on me. I lined up my thoughts, I put them in neat little rows, and I said them to Peter Petrawicki clearly and carefully so that Sippy would hear everything I said. I always felt a little like the whole world was weighing on every word I said, but this time, it might actually have been true.

“You really do believe that power must always go to the people who deserve it, don’t you?” I said, more amazed than angry. “If you didn’t believe it, you’d have to spend some fraction of your time not feeling like Jesus, and that wouldn’t be any fun.

“But then someone else gets some power, and you lose some of yours, and you don’t like that power has gone somewhere else. But you also can’t stop believing that power organizes itself correctly because your entire understanding of the world is based on that single idea. So, instead, you convince yourself that they’re cheating or corrupt or lying. Well, guess what? Today, power has organized itself in our hands instead of yours. That doesn’t mean something broke, it means you were never right. It is neither just nor unjust, it is just what happened. And you can rationalize it however you want, but it happened. You lost.”

I wanted to look back at Sippy, but he didn’t know me and I didn’t know him. This was either enough, or it wasn’t.

I stood still, silent, and then heard Miranda’s voice, soft and careful: “Sid, the thing that built Altus really did use my body to try to kill her. It might take me back over any time now. I don’t want it to. It was terrible. Please, it’s time.”

I heard Sippy arranging the headset and finally turned to look.

Peter began shouting behind me, pulling his hand against Carl’s iron grip. At first he was shouting words, but then it just became shrieks, like we were abducting his child while he watched. Maybe we were.

Within moments, Sippy had implemented a fresh terms of service update tied to a new experience—Peanut’s experience of body dislocation.

Sippy was then forced by the software to view the TOS update himself. He immediately threw off the headset, vomiting on the floor. I watched, too pleased, as a little drip of vomit flecked onto Peter’s khaki pants and he recoiled.

And then, suddenly, Peter Petrawicki slumped over, no longer being held by Carl’s hand.

At the same moment, monkey Carl revived. The little animal sprung up and padded over to me.

“Carl!” I said, excited, thinking it must be good news. “Did we do it?”

It didn’t say anything back.

“Carl? Are you OK now? Did we …” And then I saw it. The depth in the monkey’s eyes had vanished. The shape of understanding had lost its form. I wasn’t looking at a monkey inhabited by an intelligence; I was looking at a monkey. I knew it immediately and without doubt.

Miranda had moved over to check on Peter, who was lying completely motionless on the ground.

“Carl?” I said again, and the monkey moved toward me and made a small chittering noise in its throat.

Look, I have not hid that my feelings about Carl are complicated. They took April from me, they put her in danger, they showed over and over that they cared more about their plans than our lives. But also, Carl felt, at this point, like an inevitability, like someone who would always be there, guiding and knowing and caring. In that way, Carl felt like family. Maybe I didn’t trust them, maybe I wanted them to know they weren’t absolved of their past actions, but I didn’t realize until then that I had expected Carl to always be a part of my life.